A telling sign of a tyrant is lack of humor. Rarely will a despot, dictator, or reactionary be able to enjoy a good laugh at their own expense, and the laughter that does materialize is usually callous and mean-spirited.
Such is the soul of "A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Chamber Play." Director Peter Sellars - internationally acclaimed auteur and opera devotee - dumps four actors into a multi-colored box, and there they hack and hew their way through all the roles of Shakespeare's classic tale, but without any of the enjoyment or wisdom we have come to expect from the stories of Oberon and Titania, the four Athenian lovers, and the rude mechanicals.
Sellars has placed this "Dream" within a new-age vista, complete with a natural-noises soundscape, reminiscent of a Sedona Arizona energy vortex. The goal seems to be to explore the surreality of the dreams the characters experience in the play. Not the worst idea ever, but if the dreams are to be mined there must be a clear template for doing so. As it stands, the four actors (Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Trish Lindstrom, and Mike Nadajewski) simply say the familiar lines of the "Dream" in by turns angry or seductive tones, without ever letting the audience understand what type of world they are living in, if they are meant to be real people or figure-heads, or what we are meant to be gleaning by this casting minimization. They yell, they entice, they make-out, ad infitium. Such hostility of tone paves the way for some truly unpleasant line-readings, such as the morphing of Bottom's insistence on playing Thisbe from comic bravado into an unsettling rape-fantasy: Shakespeare's text is not illuminated, and no one is better off.
The end result is a monotonous and frankly boring evening that never sheds new light on its source material other than the obvious "ah, yes, dreams, indeed" reaction. The most confounding issue at play is that Sellars gives us no reason as to why such an interpretation is necessary in the contemporary annals of Shakespearean re-imagination. Sellars' director's note goes on about the Six Classes of Living Beings and the reduction of the "Dream" from a symphony to a string quartet, which implies even he can't articulate - on paper or stage - his reasons for this psychedelic (though surprisingly limiting) approach. The production can't even be called a failed concept, because in order to produce a failed concept, you first have to have a concept.
In context of recent Shakespearean travesties, "A Chamber Play" isn't quite as mind-numbingly awful as the Wooster Group's "Cry, Trojans!" (Elizabeth LaCompte's infuriating take on "Troilus & Cressida"), and the performers certainly possesses a better grasp of the language than the cast of Joss Whedon's "Much Ado About Nothing" (though without the comforting presence of Nathan Fillion). The cast are trained verse-speakers, whose cadences are pleasing to the ear, one just wishes they had a better, more considered vehicle for their talents. As Lear says of Goneril over Regan: "not being worst stands in some rank of praise."
But really, Peter Sellars, what was the point?
