Becoming Moth
That’s not me in the arms of the donkey. I’m the little brown fairy at the back! photo credit: Lara McGregor
“Moth” is the smallest role in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the cast of characters, her name comes last, after Fairy 1 and the other three fairies: Peaseblossom, Cobweb, and Mustardseed. Moth speaks only twice on her own…to say, “And I” (after Peaseblossom’s “Ready!”) and also, “Hail” as the fairies greet Nick Bottom, transformed to an ass. This is the role I play in Dunedin Summer Shakespeare’s production this year.
I’m not too proud for such a small role; I have only acted in three other plays–ever–and all of them within the past year. For this production, there are three professional actors in our company and a host of accomplished thespians, both on- and back- stage. I arrive every day with humility and gratitude, ready to learn.
When I was first cast in this role, I recall feeling embarrassed and thinking that perhaps the director (the fabulous Kim Morgan) was hoping I might simply bow out. How could they cast a 50-year-old woman in the role of a fairy? In my mind, being cast as a fairy was a micro-step up from being cast as a tree or a squirrel. No one has been cast as a tree or squirrel, by the way–it’s not a grammar school performance after all. So truly, there is no step up to Moth. But much worse than that, I have always imagined fairies as the typical ethereal English entities, light of foot and fair, played by nubile young women about half my size and half my age. I’m not large, but I’m athletic. And I’m certainly not fair. I just couldn’t see it.
When I saw my name next to that of Moth on the casting list, I knew I couldn’t not accept my role: Dunedin is a small theatre scene. Actors need to be gracious and accept the roles they are offered, especially when they are just starting out. Maybe that’s always true. I’m still learning these things. I made lots of jokes about being a “fifty-year-old fairy”--it was the easiest way for me to accept it. Laughter and self-deprecation seemed the easiest way to lean into this fairly uncomfortable new thing. I accepted the role, but I had many reservations.
On the occasion of the first assembly of the entire cast of 21 actors, plus our director, stage manager, and technical director, we had an informal mihi. Everyone seemed to know what to say to introduce themselves. There were proper pepeha, short and sweet accounts of the past three years’ experience with the company, and truncated lists of theatrical backgrounds, obviously meant to downplay accomplishments the troupe were mostly already aware of. I had little to say and felt as small as my role. It was uncomfortable and strange and, I noted, I could feel myself growing.
Growth is like that, right? It hurts. It’s uncomfortable at best. It’s what we agree to if we’re brave, but that doesn’t make it easy. In my early years, I avoided any activity I couldn’t dominate. I was a mediocre water polo player, so I only played one year of that as a kid. Otherwise, it was gymnastics, springboard diving, and surfing, the former two for which I was typically on the podium and the latter of which put me in a realm with very few women participating, let alone competing. It was easy to excel; there were simply zero expectations for your everyday female surfer in the ‘80s. So yeah, I wasn’t taking a lot of risks.
On that first afternoon, standing in the circle on Shore Street with the entire Shakespeare company, guided through voice work and theatrical warm-ups, to say I felt completely inadequate is an understatement. It was all so foreign. I knew I was pushing myself. Challenging myself. Though I had a strong impulse to flee, I stayed. These people seemed kind. And they weren’t looking at me at all. Each was involved in their own experience, fully engaged and unconcerned with what was beyond their own skin. Until it was time to connect and then—then the connections among them were profound. To me this was incredibly admirable. It was exhilarating. And beautiful. These might be some of the bravest people I’ve ever met, I thought.
I wanted to be brave like them. Maybe if I let myself, they wouldn’t know how hard it was for me. Because it was hard…but also it was completely exciting and liberating. It made me feel like I could do anything. Maybe they would see me as one of them. Maybe I could grow to believe this too and thereby let the thought of not belonging go completely. I allowed myself to soften, bit by bit. I closed my eyes and engaged.
Even as I was moving my body, lifting my voice, controlling my breath (all things I had embraced in the realm of yoga over the past 23 years), I was aware that at no point earlier in my life would I have been willing to be vulnerable in this way. It was always important to me to be poised. Controlled. Lovely. I had always wanted to be dignified. Maybe you’ll notice how many of these adjectives are determined from an external locus of control. It wasn’t what I wanted to be so much as how I wanted to be seen.
At no point in my life had I ever been so brave as to let myself appear silly, awkward, foolish, uncontrolled. Not on purpose. Many characters call for these things. It’s fun. The audience is clever; they know to separate the actor from the character. Why couldn’t I? In all fairness, I didn’t grow up in this scene, had not been surrounded by these courageous and generous people. I wondered how my life might have been different if I had. Some part of me knew, even in my discomfort, that I had missed out in many ways.
I was very much at odds during the break while actors drank tea together and laughed, recalling other shows they’d done together and catching up about their most recent projects. I remember Miriam Noonan, cast as the beautiful Hermia, approaching me very sweetly and asking me how I was liking being in New Zealand–in my introduction I had mentioned that I’d been here for only about 18 months. I remember her forlorn look as I proceeded to tell her, very near tears, that I was coming to the realisation that I, in fact, don’t belong anywhere. I was probably talking about not belonging there. In that place at that moment. Miriam smiled and looked at me with compassion, and then, like any sane person would, she took the first opportunity to escape. I remember wondering, “What am I even doing?”
As rehearsals went on, I began to get a glimpse into the vision that our director had for the play. The fairy sprite Puck was also cast with a woman my age in the role: Jessica Latton is one of the three women who founded Dunedin Summer Shakespeare. She is a huge personality in Dunedin theatre with a vast and varied background in acting, dance, and movement. She is the director of her own theatre company as well. If she could be Puck… And Barbara Power, one of the three professional actors in our company, was cast as Titania, Queen of the Fairies. These women are both amazing, and I have watched them closely, every chance I’ve gotten, and soaked in their process. Marveled at their unabashed willingness to try and even to fail (how else to perfect?). Their willingness to imagine. To embody.
There is something that feels ageless about the world of magic that it is our charge to create and then hold sacred space for in the course of this play. Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, Cobweb and I, Moth, are responsible for casting the spell of the fairy ring. For weaving the gossamer fabric of magic that envelops the audience throughout the play. With our bodies, we move and enchant the space…lawn, gardens, fairy ring and all. I am so involved in this work that I sometimes forget to say my one line. This makes me laugh, and it totally doesn’t matter that much (though Kim might beg to differ!), because the other three fairies always remember (it’s spoken in unison), but I think it speaks to how truly enchanted I myself am in the business of spinning a wordlessly magic veil and sending it out over the audiences that show up each evening and open themselves to the dream of this experience. My favourite is the children who marvel at my little wooden puppet (also a ‘moth’ and made with heartrending attention and aroha by our prop/set designer Matt) who dances before them. They marvel at the way I might break the “fourth wall” and give them a little wink. We are playing together as I move through the garden, and it is a delicious kind of freedom. It is beautiful. I am beginning to see who Moth can be to me.
I think Moth has come into my life to remind me not to take myself too seriously. I can be a 50-year-old woman, which indeed I am, with whatever personal history that grew me, whatever serious responsibilities in my career (and however many flaws and insecurities and imperfections), and still play a fairy named Moth. I don’t need to be beautiful or accomplished or dominant in any way–just committed to doing the small but important job I have been given. Moth came into my life to remind me to find joy and to propagate it. She came to me, as in a dream, and said, “Time to let go of the last vestiges of ego”.
I got to fashion my own sense of Moth (which was then fully realised by our costumer extraordinaire, Sophie Welvaert). Our director Kim asked us to draw on our own cultural ideas around fairies. “All cultures,” she said, “have some version of a fairy. What is yours?” Culturally I am a bit of a mashup. My skin is brown, but I have a lot of English and Irish ancestors. I have Tsalangi (Cherokee) ancestors, whose faces are mirrored in my own and in my black eyes, but my family have been denying that staunchly for generations. My cultural rootlessness is most certainly a reflection of colonisation, so it made sense to build out my concept of my culturally relevant fairy with a layering of traditional styling and bits appropriated from the over-culture: the deer bone and abalone shell choker and bracelet made for me by a Kiowa/Cherokee man decades ago, a bowler hat, feather earrings, a men’s waistcoat…bells around my ankles. With this vision and this costuming, Moth began to take shape.
As Moth chose her style of movement, she took both direct and indirect routes, depending on what was happening and with whom she was interacting. She moved slowly, crouched low, primal and animal-like. She was shy but profoundly curious and always entertained by the complex interactions between her fairy Queen and King, among mortals, between the spellbound Titania and the transformed weaver named Bottom. She didn’t shy away from taking it all in, manoeuvering to see every mannerism, every interaction that took place in the fairy ring. Eager to speak and to be seen, she is the least of the fairies and several times, when it seems that she will get a word in, she doesn’t. She sinks back down to her crouched position, a bit crestfallen, as Titania intervenes between the ass-headed Bottom and her moth-like minion. But Moth recovers quickly–her interest in the scene supersedes the momentary disappointment of not getting to engage with Bottom. And she is devoted to her Fairy Queen…her service to Titania is all.
I work to tease out the nuances of Moth and her significance in my life. Being her, I feel joyful and free. I feel childlike and curious. Spry and playful. She looks directly into the eyes of tamariki entranced by her puppeteering, by her gossamer wings, by the garden itself. She sways and turns gracefully but with grounded power and sureness of foot. Her fellow fairies also move in unique ways and are accoutred according to their own cultural concepts of fairyhood…Mustardseed is a wood nymph, and her costuming is inspired by flora, her movement by the energy-wielding T’ai Chi. Peaseblossom is goofy and silly; her colours are all shades of blue and she wears an enormous shell necklace, reminiscent of the sea. Cobweb is a punky, goth-inspired fairy, her long black hair falling in gentle curls over her arms as she crouches to observe the wiles of the devilish Puck and the fallout of her charms and spells.
We are a troupe within a troupe, and when our Fairy Queen and King join us, there is a camaraderie that transcends the story. It transcends the act of entertaining or art-making. This camaraderie has more to do with being so utterly vulnerable with these very people. With giving all of ourselves to this endeavor, together, and heading, undaunted, into the fray of an unknown audience. It is shared with the other mini-troupes, too…the “Mechanicals”, the “Royals”, the “Lovers”. Is it possible to love these people? I blush. But in my heart I know the answer is an unmitigated yes.
As Moth, I have been braver, more alive, and more authentic than I have perhaps ever been as an individual. The older I get the more I understand each experience as issuing from my own intention, as helping to shape my journey as a human on this planet. All I have to do is pay attention. Allow myself to grow in the ways each event and moment can grow me. I am Moth, full of lightness, of curiosity and innocence. I am Moth, full of beauty that I don’t have to grasp for or feel ashamed of. I am Moth, full of aroha and burgeoning with flight.
