Alex's Reviews & Recs: "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian

I’ve always loved Shakespeare. Even when I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, I still found myself completely immersed in his work. Out of the plays I read, A Midsummer’s Night Dream was the one that caught my attention, and it has been my favourite for years. "A Tiny Feast" by Chris Adrian is a short story based off of a subplot from that play, published in the New Yorker in 2009. In the play, the fairy king Oberon is having a fight with his wife Titania, the fairy queen. This fight is over a human boy that was Titania’s ward, and who Oberon wanted to become his errand boy. It wasn’t a big plot point in the original play, but Adrian saw something more and turned it into a beautiful yet heartbreaking story.

"A Tiny Feast" follows Oberon and Titania as their young mortal boy becomes ill with leukemia. It takes place in a modern setting, and the two fairies take the boy to a hospital. The piece is told from the third person perspective of Titania, who throughout the piece struggles coming to terms with the motherly affection she has for the boy. As well as learning to cope with the difficulties of cancer treatment and learning about human medicine, Titania and her husband explore very raw and human emotion that they hadn’t experienced before. While Oberon feels these emotions in random bursts of tears and excessive interest in whatever medicine the boy is being treated with, Titania on the other hand approaches the situation with a mask of disinterest when in reality she cares very deeply, but doesn’t want to admit it. 

Something this piece does really well is this exploration of emotions and dealing with the struggles of having a child sick with cancer. It’s a new and very uncertain experience to have, and I think Adrian captures that confusion and stages of coping very well. I think his choice to tell it from Titania’s perspective was the right one, especially with how she keeps trying to convince herself that she doesn’t actually care about this boy and how he was just one of many gifts from her husband. However, through her actions and her constant internal struggle, she starts to realize how important the boy is to her. Her realization comes to light alongside the terrible ups and downs of the boy’s treatment, and I think there’s something so perfectly heartbreaking about finally learning to love someone right as you think you might lose them.

Another thing I thought was interesting was how the fairies’ magic used as a mask was a metaphor for how people mask their real emotions during times of distress. The entire time they’re at the hospital, the king and queen have to use their magic to make it seem like they're normal human people and hide all other magical creatures and items they brought along. Only in the end does Titania take down this facade to show their true colors to the human world. I enjoyed how that was a constant secondary obstacle they had to face, having to hide their magical selves from everyone. 

Overall, "A Tiny Feast" is a successful twist and adaptation of a Shakespeare story that puts the characters in a modern setting. It kept me on the edge of my seat and made me feel a plethora of strong emotions, as well as creating incredibly unique and vivid images with the clashing elements of a plain hospital and brightly colored magic. It was so tragically Shakespearan at its core, and truly harnessed the two big themes of tragedy and comedy that are present in Shakespeare’s work. It showed how deeply affected people can be by the rollercoaster of a spectrum that is the human experience, even though it were nonhumans that felt it. Maybe they’re much more human than they thought, with love and pain and everything in between.