Mark Rector, Jane McPherson, and Jim Hopkins in A Midsummer Night's Dream
The nasal bleat of a Volkswagen Beetle signals that the Orlando Shakespeare Festival's A Midsummer Night's Dream will not be an ordinary play. Shakespeare's characters, after all, do not usually arrive by bug. Not in Orlando, at least, where performing Shakespeare almost always means a slavish devotion to what we think of as the traditional style of producing his plays. But director Robert Hall puts a new face on the familiar with his production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. With macho construction workers and jealous yuppies sharing the stage, Hall must mean to make Shakespeare's characters identifiable to modern audiences. More than that, though, he has produced a play that is as absurdly, fantastically funny as it can be. Consider, for example, the workmen who are Midsummer's humorous heart, who perform the show's ridiculous play-within-a-play. Hall makes each of them wonderfully individual comic types: Nick Bottom (Devon Schumacher) a jovial, expansive idiot in a flannel shirt and hard hat, a man in love with the sound of his voice; Peter Quince (Ben Gunter) a prim, compulsive Mr. Goodwrench with a deceptively mild-mannered Southern accent; Francis Flute (Jim Helsinger) a long-haired heavy-metaler who would prefer playing Schwarzenegger in the play-within-a-play but is stuck with the heroine Thisbe. Even the smallest parts are memorable: Paul M. Wegman as | the prissy Robin Starveling, who deflates under criticism; Nick Rodriguez as Tom Snout, a good-natured blockhead; and especially Matthew Mabe (the festival's Romeo) as Snug, an old-fashioned cigar-smoking comedian in a porkpie hat. The workmen are just one part, of course, of Midsummer's story, in which nearly everyone falls absurdly, excessively in love with the wrong person and is cured of it magically, as if in a dream. Hall has turned the play's fairies into wondrous painters, who create the enchanted forest as we watch. Shakespeare's two pairs of young aristocrats are bickering yuppies presided over by a blustery, ineffectual father, and the setting's nominal rulers are military types in uniforms and boots. Yet the upper crust pales in comparison with the workingmen. Hall hasn't made their stories as interesting, and their characters seem less fleshed out. (An exception is Jane McPherson's Hermia, who draws closer to hysteria by the minute.) It is left to Steven P. Lewis' Puck, the most anarchic of the fairies, to draw the play together, to show us, indeed, what fools these mortals be. Lewis is no airy sprite: He's masculine, sarcastic and edgy, and if anyone seems capable of magic, he's the man. Still, audiences may find themselves shaking their heads over what all this was about - shaking their heads and not minding all the while. Hall's production is too creative for most people to miss a more traditional staging, which would lack Lynn Brinkley's be-bop version of ''Philomel'' and the rap rendering of ''Bottom's Dream.'' It would lack Sandria G. Reese's eclectic costumes and Thisbe's demonstration of the Heimlich maneuver. And it might lack the terrifically inventive silliness that recalls one thing Shakespeare was all about - that he wanted, above all, to entertain. |
