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.”