That ’70s show

Shakespeare has gone psychedelic.

After two years of more modern shows, Jay County High School thespians are going back to the bard. And bringing him to the 1970s.

JCHS will put on its production of “A Midspring's Hallucination” at 7 p.m. Friday, approximately 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday in the school’s auditorium.

The show is a take of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” but moved to a 1970s setting. JCHS teacher Carol Gebert wrote the show in 1992 and decided to revive it this year after recent performances of “The Miracle Worker” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The show is set in the ’70s “because that’s my childhood,” said Gebert. “I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s.

“You’ll hear references to all my favorite TV shows, my boyfriend’s favorite song, all of that.”

While Gebert wrote the show, she has handed off the directing reins to Melany Morris. The Ball State University senior is serving as a student teacher at JCHS this year.

She also designed the set — it has a variety of ’70s patterns while still keeping the forest theme — and helped build it along with Jay County students.

“Building the set was incredible,” Morris said. “It’s exactly what I envisioned, exactly what I designed. I wanted it to be like a playground because the story is very childlike and dreamy and just so ’70s.”

It’s a return to Shakespeare for JCHS, which performed “The Complete work of William Shakespeare, Abridged” in 2017. That show crams as many Shakespeare works as possible into the first act before shifting to Hamlet in the second act.

While not quite as hectic, “A Midspring's Hallucination” has some similarities. There are multiple plots — two, four or seven, depending on who you ask — running through the show. 

Robin “Puck” Goodfellow, played by JCHS senior Catherine Stafford, is the trouble maker through it all.

“Puck is the antagonist for everything,” Stafford said. “He’s the one who messes up the lovers. He’s the one who gets Titania to fall in love with Bottom, turns Bottom into half-donkey. … All of these  things are interweaving with each other because Puck can’t keep his nose out of everything.”

Both Stafford and Drew Simmons, who plays Nick Bottom, said the cast as a whole has made working on the show enjoyable.

It incorporates every actor in a significant way, Simmons said. That includes some elementary and middle school students, who Stafford refers to as “tiny balls of sunshine.”

“It’s a lot of fun,” she added. “We have young kids and older kids, and we’re all enjoying ourselves while we’re doing it. And I think it shows.”

The production opens with a show at 7 p.m. Friday. The Saturday performance will be at approximately 8 p.m. in order to allow cast members who are also part of the Patriot Edition show choir to drive back from the state competition on the south side of Indianapolis. There will also be a matinee at 2 p.m. Sunday.

“They’ve worked really, really hard,” said Morris of her cast and crew. “It really means a lot to them, and they’re doing a great job.”