“lord, what fools these mortals be.”

Life doesn’t unfold as we expect it to, especially not for the characters in this play. We begin in Athens, home of Socrates and Plato, a society firmly grounded in rational thought and familiar hierarchy. Wives are subservient to husbands, dukes rule with unquestioned authority, and fathers choose their daughters’ partners, but the younger generation is pushing back against the familiar order.

At the same time, the supernatural world of the fairies is in chaos. The dance that keeps the seasons in balance has been upset by Oberon’s insistence that the fairy queen, Titania, obey his will. Titania has other ideas.

Also in Athens, a group of tradespeople are creating a play. What they lack in theatrical experience, they make up for with imagination and passion. Like every theater artist in history, they grapple with how to tell a story that their audience will find inspiring and moving.

The solution for all these characters is to go into the forest. The forest in Shakespeare is always the world of nature, the irrational world of magic and dreams. When we go to the forest, we get lost, we fall in the mud, we fight and love with passion, we say things we might later regret, and we are changed. Returning from the forest, we see the world “with parted eyes, when every thing seems doubled.” We may see the world less clearly, but we are more fully present in it.

In the forest, our characters find the kind of love that wouldn’t be possible when things are neat and orderly and expected. They challenge themselves and their compatriots. They find “concord in discord,” community in striving together.

Returning from the forest, we sometimes need artists to remind us what we experienced. While our small group of theater artists has few grand credits to their names, they found some magic in the forest, and as artists, they know how to bring it back to Athens.

In 2004, community leaders invited a different, ragtag bunch of theater artists to found a Shakespeare festival in Winona. It was the next step in a long tradition of embracing artists and making the arts a part of this community. This season, Great River Shakespeare Festival moves into a new home in a building that is filled with a history of ritual and enchantment. There might be no better place to continue to grapple with these plays, search for the unexpected, fall in the metaphorical mud and hopefully come out with a little magic.