My Midsummer Dream: 7 Plays, 5 Days, 4 Stages, 1 Story

Walking the streets of this almost-too-charming town along the I-kid-you-not Avon River, I’ve often had the experience of hearing voices in my head.

I am but mad north-northwest, as Hamlet would have it. After all, at the Stratford Festival, 400 miles in that direction from my usual haunts, internal voices are utterly normal, the result of seeing, cheek by jowl, so many new productions. After you see two or three, they start a conversation, sometimes delighting in what they have in common and sometimes arguing about what they don’t.

During a visit in July, those voices were louder than ever. The five plays and two musicals I caught in five days on four stages were not just conversing but collaborating, seeming to scribble in one another’s scripts. “Twelfth Night” wrote part of “La Cage aux Folles.” “Something Rotten” cribbed “Romeo and Juliet.” “Hedda Gabler” and “The Goat” drank from the same bloody fountain.

And “Cymbeline”? Well, that little-loved Shakespeare once again proved to be mad on its own.

The clash and coupling of such seemingly different works is the great value, and great pleasure, of the repertory system, one so difficult to sustain that few theaters bother anymore. Stratford is by every measure — budget, employment, attendance, production — the largest repertory theater in North America, and likely the largest nonprofit theater, period.

Also the broadest. Where else could you take in so easily a program so diverse, by genre, era, style and origin? Indeed, if you hit the right part of the season, which this year began on April 16 and runs through Nov. 17, you could theoretically see all 12 shows in one week.

That efficiency wouldn’t matter unless the shows were good; in some years, that’s all they are, and that’s enough. But this year, both in scope and quality, Stratford outdid itself, with a thrilling “Goat” and “Gabler,” a delightful “Cage” and “Rotten” and a scintillating “Twelfth Night.”

“Twelfth Night” may be the skeleton key that unlocks the others. On the surface it’s a remix of Shakespeare’s favorite tropes: shipwrecked twins, star-crossed lovers, wise clowns, vain martinets. It ends, as such comedies must, with proper recouplings and the working out of justice.

Ah, but look under the hood, as Seana McKenna’s production does so winningly. For a comedy, “Twelfth Night” is surprisingly melancholy; three of its main characters begin the play in mourning. The love story is vastly complicated by gender mayhem: The twin who is a woman disguises herself as a man, causing several “wrong” people to fall for each other. Nor is justice ideally just; the martinet, Malvolio, gets a cruelly disproportionate comeuppance.

McKenna connects and further complicates those themes by making Malvolio a prim, hypercompetent woman — in Laura Condlln’s vivid performance the kind who might have rapped your knuckles in fourth grade or frowned at your outfit on casual Friday. Even so, when she is tricked into falling in love with her lady, then tortured for it, you feel the unfair weight of society’s ambient sexism and homophobia recalibrating the play’s scales.

If you don’t find those ideas Shakespearean, you’re really not going to like the appropriation and reinterpretation that are the engine of “Something Rotten,” in which two Elizabethan siblings seek to one-up the poet by inventing a newfangled genre called the musical. The show, which debuted on Broadway in 2015, ransacks just about every play in the Folio, pilfering the gender switch and the martinet from “Twelfth Night” and, from “Romeo and Juliet,” which I saw earlier the same day, a heady evocation of heedless first love. Donna Feore’s breathlessly funny production winds these and many other references into a breakneck farce that delivers guffaws in gale force. I won’t soon forget the dancing eggs of the not quite “Hamlet” they call “Omelette.”

“Romeo” itself was less memorable, except as a premonition, anticipating not just “Something Rotten” but also “Hedda Gabler,” which I saw two days later. Unexpectedly, the tragedies managed a fascinating conversation: Both end with double suicides, underlining, despite a gap of 300 years, the powerlessness of their female protagonists except when it comes to besotted men.

How tragedies influence comedies and vice versa is one of the themes of Stratford’s gender- and genre-fluid season. The cross-dressing of “Twelfth Night” — or, for that matter of any Shakespeare play, because the women were originally played by boys — is a natural precursor to a show like “La Cage,” the 1983 musical farce about Georges, who runs a Riviera drag club, and Albin, his spouse and star, acknowledged as the mother of their now-adult straight son.

“La Cage” is having something of a renaissance, with major productions earlier this summer at Barrington Stage and, starting in November, at the Pasadena Playhouse. But Thom Allison’s heartful take at Stratford is the first I’ve seen that lifts the show’s narrow concerns about gay acceptance to a higher level. Steve Ross, who has discussed his body issues as a “big, stocky guy,” makes an especially moving Albin, becoming glorious not by squeezing into slinky silhouettes but by fully inhabiting the generous hourglass gowns designed for him by David Boechler.

There’s something Shakespearean in that, at least at Stratford, where Ross and his co-star Sean Arbuckle, excellent as Georges, have long histories in the tragedies. Switching to musical comedy, they bring with them a deep feeling for the disdain with which society greets any deviation from the standard, yet also, in Ross’s transformation, the joy of using disguises to explore parts of the personality that might otherwise be unavailable.

Though I saw “La Cage” on my first night at Stratford, Albin’s lyric “I am my own special creation” echoed for days. The faces of disguise and revelation, spinning like a penny until they blurred, kept showing up in unlikely places. “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” — Edward Albee’s 2002 stunner — takes the idea of being one’s own special creation about as far as it can go, when a successful, happily married architect (Rick Roberts, gripping) falls in love with, well, the title creature. That he has a gay teenage son ups the ante: We easily accept him, but how far will we follow the implied arc of freedom?

For the architect’s wife, played with jaw-dropping wit and fury by Lucy Peacock in Dean Gabourie’s production, the answer is: not that far. But Albee, who did not live to see this late work become a classic, as it now seems to be, refuses to let the audience off the hook so easily. Though he provides a Malvolio-like defender of social norms in the person of the architect’s best friend, that friend gets sliced to bits by the play’s slashing argument, and winds up, again like Malvolio, in a kind of exile. But so does everyone else.

Ultimately and unexpectedly, the multitude of Malvolio figures — not just in “Twelfth Night” and “The Goat”— pulled the strings of my Stratford theatergoing into a knot. I began to see him everywhere, perhaps in part because Juan Chioran, who played the anti-theatrical Puritan in “Something Rotten,” also played his anti-gay kindred spirit in “La Cage.” In works that address the opportunities, limitations and unresolved future of liberation, as so many of this year’s offerings do, there must be an opposing force of oppression that says this is dirty, abnormal, a sin.

Or, in “Hedda Gabler,” as it’s usually translated, “People don’t do such things.” What’s strange and powerful in Molly Atkinson’s production (using Patrick Marber’s brutal adaptation) is that even though the famous last line is uttered by a character who thinks he finally has Hedda in his clutches, it might have been uttered by almost anyone. The pressure of conformity is so relentless in the society Ibsen writes about that the character most desirous of freedom is the one least able to achieve it. Only in death can Hedda — a stingingly neurotic Sara Topham — escape what others think.

And yet, in a way, she doesn’t. Hedda still hangs balefully over modern drama the way Shakespeare playfully hangs over her, and the Greeks, in horror, over him. What this year’s Stratford Festival — which amazingly has four more shows yet to open — demonstrates is that these works not only converse but do so as family; even the most modern, “The Goat,” is conspicuously a Greek tragedy. They are all chiefly concerned with the free, full expression of the genuine self, and thus with restraint as both enemy and corrective. If we are each our own special creation, how do we honor what’s special in everyone else?