Ass in the Woods

There’s been a lot of discussion of adaptation in the discourse recently: what, if anything, is owed to source material? Does that answer change depending on whether the author is still around, or if they’re long since gone? Is using an existing work as a lens on your own preoccupations a bracing way of demonstrating contemporary relevance, or an act of literary plunder? Both? Neither?

There probably aren’t any Shakespeare scholars waiting to charge into the discussion of Ass in the Woods the way that Emily Wilson went after Nolan’s Odyssey, but the dynamics aren’t actually that far apart. Despite initially thinking the title was previewing an entirely different experience, this choice-based work is a riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, placing the player as a nameless witness to some of the comedy’s key sequences. But much like a sirens-and-cyclops-only adaptation of Homer, only the flashiest bits of the plot are kept: there’s a bit of fairy king Oberon and fairy queen Titania squabbling, a lot of Bottom hogging the spotlight after he’s been transformed into his half-donkey shape, and the sprite Puck’s mischief-making sprinkled throughout, but the lovers whose travails are the central but arguably least-novel element of the original play are nowhere in evidence.

There’s a case to be made for the all killer no filler adaptation, especially since this is a sprightly bit of IF that says its piece and gets off-stage in twenty minutes or so – I can’t say that I genuinely missed Hermia and Helena or the noxious Demetrius, not when Ass in the Woods offers set-pieces like Bottom capering about to the delight of an audience of screaming fairies (I’m not usually one who overvalues graphics in IF, but the intentionally-clumsy photoshop of a dude with a giant donkey pasted over his face dancing on stage while fairies pasted next to spotlights hover overhead is hilarious) or gives you an opportunity to tell Oberon the home truth that he’s a crappy husband.

It’s not even theme-park Shakespeare, but there’s definitely fun to be had, even if the writing is a bit more typo-laden and pedestrian than I’d prefer. Like, here’s Puck’s introductory speech:

"How did I miss you? This is why I say, “All for one prank, one prank for all”. Now, you’ll ask “Who I am? - I’m Puck” and “Why am I here? - Pranks”. Questions done and sorted. Now, we can have fun."

Hopefully it’s not too snobbish to note that that’s not exactly improving upon “I am that merry wanderer of the night…”

More broadly, though, Ass in the Wood’s orientation towards Midsummer Night’s Dream strikes me as a bit confused. I don’t think it works well as an attempt to tell an independent story with these characters – my sense is that it would be mostly incomprehensible to those not familiar with the basic setup – but the game also doesn’t seem especially interested in engaging with Shakespeare’s play, either. Like, the plot here ultimately comes down to the effect Bottom’s ego trip is having on the other members of his troupe, and where most of the choices in the earlier bits are purely expressive or cosmetic, here your decisions about what to say can either lead to a bad ending where they go their separate ways, or a happy one where he tames his prima-donna tendencies and they all hit the road together. But beyond being an uncharacteristically maudlin note given what’s come before, this changes Shakespeare’s setup quite drastically – it’s a reasonable riff on Bottom’s behavior in the play, but a big part of the joke there is that he and the rest of the actors are terrible, moonlighting tradesmen whose po-faced attempts at tragedy leave the other characters reeling with laughter.

Is playing the conflict here straight an attempt to reclaim dignity for these working-class amateurs that the original play holds up as objects of ridicule? Umm, maybe, but I’m not sure what that has to do with the abbreviated conflict between Titania and Oberon, which is likewise significantly shifted (there’s no Indian page in sight, thankfully). And Bottom still comes off like a conceited jerk, just one who in some endings can get over himself – plus the whole crew sure seem like professional actors in Ass in the Woods, which undercuts some elements of the critique, if critique it is.

All told I’m not sure that the game is an updating of Midsummer Night’s Dream or a reimagining of it or an examination of its contradictions or oversights: it just feels like a bunch of funny stuff that uses some of the same characters and some of the same plot bits for its jokes without worrying too much about what it’s saying about what’s come before. And you know, maybe that’s fine – not every adaptation needs to launch a thousand think-pieces.