I was late.

This is rarely a good beginning to a night at the theatre, but Shakespeare had been dead for more than four hundred years, so I assumed he could wait another ten minutes.

My wife disagreed.

We hurried through High Park until a small black sign appeared beside the path.

“Dream this way,” it said, with a yellow arrow pointing into the woods.

I have received worse instructions in life.

So we followed it.

The path disappeared between the trees, and somewhere below us, hundreds of people were already watching Twelfth Night.

My wife performed one of those mysterious acts that occasionally make married people realize they have married someone far more competent than themselves: she found a place among the crowd.

I did not.

People filled the terraced slope all the way down toward the stage, sitting shoulder to shoulder.

I wandered farther back.

And that was when I saw them.

Three chairs.

Two were occupied.

The one in the middle was empty.

The man on my left was pale and dressed almost entirely in black, with a dark cloak and the solemn face of someone who had not smiled since the Middle Ages.

The other wore an elaborate old-fashioned costume and carried himself with considerably more confidence, although he looked no happier.

Actors, I thought.

I sat between them.

The performance had already begun.

There was music. There was laughter. The actors were excellent. Viola became Cesario; identities slipped into one another; people fell in love with the wrong people; and soon the entire forest seemed to agree that reality was unnecessarily restrictive.

I was having a wonderful time.

The man in black was not.

“This makes no sense,” he muttered.

I looked at him.

“What?”

“A sister and a brother. Everyone mistakes one for the other. Nobody asks a sensible question.”

The man on my right shrugged.

“People make mistakes, Hamlet.”

I stopped smiling.

Hamlet?

The man in black turned toward him.

“They mistake an entire human being, Othello.”

I looked at the other man.

Othello?

No. Obviously not.

They were actors.

Very committed actors.

Othello folded his arms.

“I once mistook a handkerchief for evidence of adultery.”

There was a pause.

Hamlet nodded.

“Fair point.”

I looked toward the forest.

Of course.

Dream this way.

Now the sign made sense.

No wonder I had followed it so easily. Most nights I managed to turn my dreams into nightmares without any directions at all!

And now, on the one evening I had come to see a comedy, I had somehow ended up sitting between two tragedies.

I turned back to the stage.

Perhaps it was better not to ask questions.

A few minutes later, Othello sighed.

“The problem is trust.”

Hamlet almost laughed.

“You are perhaps the last person qualified to lecture anyone about trust.”

“And you,” Othello replied, “are perhaps the last person qualified to lecture anyone about making decisions.”

That one hurt.

I tried to concentrate on Twelfth Night.

Onstage, everything was becoming increasingly chaotic.

Beside me, four centuries of unresolved trauma were warming up.

“At least I loved my wife,” Othello said.

“You killed your wife.”

“I said I loved her, Hamlet. I did not say I handled it well.”

Hamlet rolled his eyes.

Othello looked at him and said:

“And you handled your family brilliantly?”

“That is different.”

“Of course. You had mommy issues.”

Silence.

Even I turned around for that one.

“Gentlemen,” I whispered, “we are watching a comedy. Could we perhaps stop discussing murder, jealousy, dead fathers and mothers? I have enough problems of my own.”

They both looked at me.

Then at each other.

Then back at me.

Othello frowned.

“You people still separate comedy from tragedy?”

Hamlet leaned closer.

“You have never heard of black comedy?”

“Of course I have.”

“The grotesque?”

“Yes.”

“Monsieur Verdoux?”

I stared at him.

“Chaplin?”

Hamlet nodded.

I looked at Othello.

Then back at Hamlet.

“Wait. You two have seen Monsieur Verdoux?”

Othello looked offended.

“We are dead, sir.”

Hamlet completed the sentence.

“Not uncultured.”

I decided this conversation had reached a level my ticket definitely had not prepared me for.

So I surrendered.

Below us, Twelfth Night continued. Viola loved Orsino. Olivia loved Cesario. Sir Toby drank, Malvolio suffered, identities collided, and the audience laughed.

Beside me, Hamlet and Othello occasionally whispered insults at each other.

I stopped interfering.

At some point, Hamlet complained that the comedy would have been considerably shorter if anyone had asked the right question.

Othello reminded him that asking questions had never exactly solved his problems.

Hamlet did not speak to him for several minutes.

For the first time all evening, I enjoyed some peace.

Soon, the performance ended. The audience applauded, and the stage glowed beneath the trees.

My wife was climbing toward me, delighted.

“That was amazing!”

Then she stopped.

She looked beside me.

“What are these doing here?”

I turned.

The two men were gone.

On one chair lay a black cloak.

On the other, an embroidered handkerchief.

My wife looked at me suspiciously.

“Are you thinking of becoming an actor now?”

I looked at the empty chairs.

Then toward the dark path through the trees.

Somewhere up there, the little sign was still pointing the way:

Dream this way.

Next time, I thought, I might take a different path.

YF, August 19, 2026

Note: A warm thank-you to Canadian Stage for bringing Twelfth Night to life as part of Dream in High Park. Thank you to the cast and creative team for such a joyful, imaginative, and memorable evening.