My college has a beautiful park with lots of neat little intimate spaces and gardens. I would love to put on a promenade production of Midsummer Night's Dream or perhaps even The Tempest in which the actors would inhabit these spaces and the audience would roam around and watch each bit of the play.

Has anyone tried this before? How can I make it work?

I've seen this done with another show (a historical murder mystery)...the trick there was to have several playing spaces along the way with a guide in character that moved the audience along in a time sequence.  Several performances were given for smaller groups that went through at 10 minute intervals.  They had the play broken up so that the actors didn't move.  I'm guessing but not certain that scenes were played in different orders and intermissions taken at different times allowing the show time to work .  (The audience was the 'jury' and they listened to testimony so it doesn't really matter if you listen to the irish maid's testimony first or the lover's first).  It would be difficult to break up most plays this way because characters appear in more than one scene and scenes can't usually be played out of order.  Only one character in this play repeated and his second scene was played on the stairs outside the room his first scene was in.

Edited by vickifrank - 3/31/10 at 8:33am

I also really like this idea, but it would be difficult using a traditional play format. It would work beautifully for vignettes or a series of shorts or even scene studies. Royalties could get tricky unless you used plays in public domain. Shakespeare would work lovely for an adaption of something I staged as a student.

I chose love as the theme and titled it In The Garden of Love. I didn't have an actual garden, so the set was made to look like a park/garden with plants and park benches (very simple to stage). I chose a spectrum of emotional situations i.e. unrequited love, new love, love gone sour, loss of love, etc. and wrote my own narration (including appropriate quotes about love etc.) to transition from one story to the next.

Each "scene" was cast with separate actors. Which allowed the actors a very flexible rehearsal schedule. It would also solve a lot of the logistical problems. The curtain call had each actor reciting a line from the famous 1 Corinthians 13 scripture "love is patient.. love is kind..." Which I thought was a nice way to wrap up the evening.

Feel free to borrow this idea (I am sure its hardly original hee hee). I think it has great potential to work.. in fact, I may just revisit the idea myself and pitch it to our theatre board as a fund-raising event.