'Midsummer Night's Dream' production introduces new collaboration

 "A Midsummer Night's Dream" casts its appeal in several directions simultaneously, and rare is the production that is consistently balanced. Why is this masterpiece so attractive to theater companies? Maybe because they can catch the spirit of the piece while wrenching it here and there and seeing what settles. They can make it look whimsical and intricately planned at the same time — probably just what Shakespeare intended. 

Titania cradles the enchanted Bottom.

The love interest is split among three levels: aristocratic, supernatural, and raucously young adult. Then there's the nonsense, focused on the gimcrack show a clutch of blue-collar workers concocts to celebrate the aristocratic match, whose celebration rests upon conquest. The Bard supplied the chyron for this show, as he so often does: "The course of true love never did run smooth."

About a year ago I saw the last local version before the one I got to on its second night at the Fort Ben Cultural Center. The new venture is Bard Fest and Arts for Lawrence working together. The site presents challenges and opportunities. A small pavilion, seeming more at home for mid-size band concerts, invites the action to spill out onto the lawn and a sidewalk that heads straight back from center stage. Yes, it's outdoors without amplification of actors' voices, competing with traffic sounds from Post Road and East 56th Street and, close at hand, playground noise that focuses on a splendid swing set.

Matthew Socey, directing the show with evident purpose and abandon, has his actors go full tilt at making up in action and vocal volume for the difficulty of having the intricate text fully intelligible. They run to and fro with the desperate energy of Josh Hawley; they toss the word salad around as liberally as Kevin McCarthy. But that's enough analogizing with the present day. The setting is blurringly timeless but specifically associated with New Orleans; the Louisiana accents fortunately are concentrated in the upper-class figures of  the affianced aristocrats Theseus and Hippolyta, with some underlining from the aggrieved parent Egeus and Theseus' Master of the Revels, Philostrate.

It's hard to avoid comparisons, especially with my most recent acquaintance: IndyShakes at its new Riverside Park home a year ago. But I will do so. At the end of the day, every "MND" tub rests on its own Bottom, the tradesman who accidentally mediates between the supernatural and natural worlds, all the while the lovers from both fairyland and an imaginary Athens end up with the right partners. So I will rest my initial impressions of the July 22 performance right there. (The production runs through July 24.)

Kelsey VanVoorst is a talented clown, and brings to this role a necessary exuberance. But she (all the "rude mechanicals" who put together the theatrical exhibition are female) is just about the most unlovable Bottom I've ever seen. It's a defensible interpretation, perhaps, but is misleading insofar that we first see the eager weaver in this version as too vain, putting herself forward as ideal for most of the roles when Peter Quince is gathering his fellows to plan the show.

This carries over to the hilarious scenes of Bottom's enchantment after he's turned into a donkey and wooed by Titania (Afton Shepard, who turns in a powerful interpretation of the fairy queen as well as of the fiancee Hippolyta). This Bottom is rather stuck on a kind of distaste for his "translation," when to me Bottom's great gift is his geniality and his readiness to be swept away by new experiences. He has what the poet John Keats was later to call "negative capability" -- a gift for entering fully other realities as they present opportunities to be other than his proud but limited tradesman self. This is why his fellow tradesmen loved him; they don't see him as an egotist.

In this show, Bottom becomes rather peremptory in his requests for service from the fairies, who under Titania's command are willing to flatter her infatuation by doing whatever the enchanted Bottom may require. Bottom should never act from a position of entitlement; he is an enthusiast, given to malapropisms through an illiterate love of language (though why does this Bottom pronounce the "w" in "sword"?) and an exuberance that blurs sense impressions. He emerges from his enchantment more truly himself.

Some of the best attention to the play's less uproarious language can be heard in the performances of Jo Bennett as Theseus and the fairy King Oberon (worthily partnered with Afton Shepard in the corresponding female roles) and in some crucial context-setting speeches by Diane Tsao as Puck.

The young lovers are cast with perhaps, in one case, an excessive love of the gender fluidity one finds in modern Shakespeare productions, particularly of this show. To turn the Hermia-Lysander relationship into same-sex attraction is jarring, especially since "Lysandra" (Kristie Schuh) cannot be considered a counterpart to the other swain, Demetrius (the roaring Matt Walls), when that means that the initial conflict about suitable marriages in a rule-bound society is totally upset.  Of course, Egeus would not consider "Lysandra" a suitable partner for his (in this case, her) daughter Hermia.  The only time I believed in the naturalness of the Lydandra-Demetrius equality of opposition was when they engaged in some background rock-paper-scissors and yoga poses while their lady loves Hermia and Helena were verbally cat-fighting at length. That was a clever touch, even if it did draw attention away from what the girls were saying. 

All told, the production must be commended for the zest of its physically extravagant action, which "Midsummer Night's Dream" can hardly do without, and the resourcefulness with which the show puts across an intricate story in a setting that doesn't permit a great deal of magic to be more than hinted at technically. No wonder the last act wallowed in the nonsense of the "rude mechanicals" play, as the action was able to largely stay put on the pavilion stage and maximize the sight gags and the deliberately amateurish stumbles of the tradesmen.  But as Theseus says, with charity as well as a touch of gloom: "...your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead there need none to be blamed."

The effect of the outsize fun, however, was to further distance Shakespeare's celebration of true concord in marriage from what is bound to leave the most lasting impression on this audience: the madcap element of which he was also a master.

[Photo by Rob Slaven]