A Midsummer Night's Dream is an underrated play. Despite it being maybe the most often-produced comedy in the world, the most beloved item of family entertainment in classical literature, and one of the most adapted and pictorially represented works of the most famous playwright of all time, by and large its joys are still underestimated. The problems endemic to productions of the Dream stem from directors' inability to fuse the A-plot with the B-plot. They may grasp the youthful passion and insanity of the four lovers, and they may appreciate the wacky antics of the 'rude mechanicals' putting on their play, but usually their understanding of how these two plots merge ends once Bottom's donkey's head has been removed. Why these two threads of forest-based psychedelic romance and amateur community theatricals live in the same play almost never gets resolved. We usually see the play-within-the-play of 'Pyramus and Thisbe' as the story's after-dinner-digestive: pleasing, but clearly not the star protein.
This lack of imagination gives the Dream the reputation of light, positive entertainment; movie theater buttered popcorn at the Shakespeare-plex. The ideal kids intro to Shakespeare. However, if read carefully, not only is the play fun, fantastical, delightful, and all the attributes that make it so popular, but also profoundly life-affirming in an uncommon way. Through their crazy night in the forest, Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander, are all gifted the opportunity to expend the growing pains of adolescence in a single evening. And through experiencing the highs and lows of the theatrical process, Bottom, Quince, and the rest of the mechanicals, all learn there is joy to be found within the act of creating something as an artistic team, whose power is greater than the sum of its parts. And then by witnessing the mechanicals perform 'Pyramus and Thisbe', the four lovers realize that the revelations one has after one has been drugged by the fairies, and endured what you could call a 'bright night of the soul', doesn't need such a fanciful setting in order to occur. Sometimes, such revelations can come about simply by experiencing communal storytelling with your loved ones, and that by witnessing such art with your romantic partner, you actually forge a stronger inter-personal connection. Fictional voyages taken as a team, whether via fairy influence or in a playhouse setting, have real-world ramifications. Experiencing stories with your loved ones helps you love them better.
In Act 5 of the Dream, Nick Bottom is strutting and fretting his way through the tragic bathos of Pyramus, who believes his love, Thisbe, to have recently met her end via lion attack. In the audience, Duke Theseus snidely remarks: "this passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad." Rather than doubling-down on his wryness, Duchess Hippolyta simply admits "beshrew my heart, but I pity the man." Hippolyta opening up about her emotional experience paves the way for Francis Flute to nail his final soliloquy as Thisbe over Pyramus's corpse, and the genuine pathos the audience feels is organically led to the concluding bergomask dance that ends the evening with celebratory catharsis. By watching this play, the recently married Theseus and Hippolyta learn something about each other, and solidify their marriage in a way that otherwise wouldn't have happened. However silly the entertainment, fiction brought about a unique emotional proximity. The newlyweds needed to experience 'Pyramus and Thisbe' to flourish as loving couples, and that's why Shakespeare gave us both the A-plot and the B-plot.
I realize I have talked for a long time without even mentioning the production I am claiming to 'review', and that's only because it is vital we be on the same page that A Midsummer Night's Dream is not 'fun': it is wise and warm and soulful in the kind of way that soothes the brain and grasps the body in a long embrace to confirm that the life you've lived hasn't been an idle failure but instead one nourished by joy and connection and that when you die you'll have a funeral filled with love and eloquence. That is to what productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream should aspire.
So. How does director David Daniel's production at American Players Theatre do in that regard? All in all, not bad. The main sin on display here is the pacing. Like many actors who turn to directing, Daniel has the habit of encouraging over-relished words at the expense of dexterous thoughts. Thus, while we hear Shakespeare's language spoken with care and feeling, it largely lacks the propulsive drive needed to remind us we are watching events happening under a deadline. Daniel's production ends up being so affable that I doubt the lack of a motor will bother many theatregoers, but the first half especially sags under the weight of too many individual turns-of-phrase feeling like they're all coming gift-wrapped from Tiffany's; the preciousness is an unnecessary weight.
A useful canary/coal mine test to see if any production of the Dream is operating in good faith is the interpretation of Helena and Demetrius. Do we feel good about them ultimately, and trust that Helena's passion is placed upon an ethically adequate object, or do we think Demetrius will be spending his days under the influence of a mystical roofie? Here, as with the show in general, Daniel's heart is basically in the right place, with some imaginative limitations. Both Maggie Cramer (as Helena) and Josh Krause (as Demetrius) are incredibly strong performers who do their best to plant the seeds of a real relationship between the two even in the earlier forest scenes. However, Daniel is unwilling to mine the BDSM interplay that exists between these characters, which ends up limiting the possible joy we could be feeling via their unique love language. This places an unfair burden on Cramer who ends up having to make lines like "I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you" sound like Helena apologizing for her feelings, rather than an unapologetic and resounding confirmation of a physical history that exists between these two. The "love-in-idleness" potion is not a zero-sum game: for some people it makes them less of their real self, for some people it takes away inhibitions, and for some people it allows them truer access to their authentic personhood. When Demetrius eventually proclaims his love for Helena in the broad light of day, the potion's influence is immaterial: we should know he is speaking his inner truth, which earlier in the play he found embarrassing because of the overwhelming power of its intensity. Helena is a tornado in which any man would be lucky to get swept away, but under Daniel's direction, the two don't have the wild anarchy that would make them most loveable. Though Krause, under the love-juice's influence, parroting back "goddess, nymph, divine and rare, / Precious, celestial" as Cramer feeds him the compliments is a sweet moment where we believe in the positive case for Helena and Demetrius. Also, Krause's swelling speech to Theseus about how his love for Hermia "melted as the snow" succeeds in feeling genuine and earned and not ending their trajectory on a sour note. They both fare as well as they can, under the circumstances.
Where Daniel comes closest to finding the real heart of the Dream is in the reactions the nobility has to 'Pyramus and Thisbe.' They clearly find it affecting, and enjoy it based on its own terms. This isn't the marriage-solidifying optimism of the text, but it's quite funny when Hermia (Samantha Newcomb) is unpacking the play's ending, says "moonshine and lion are left to bury the dead," and Cramer's Helena adds "aye.....and Wall, too??" Her good-natured but bewildered elucidation of the unique theatrical world-building she has just witnessed is hilarious. While I wish the nobles could have better shown the effect of the play on their identities as couples and not just as individuals, the ensuing bergomask, which starts with Bottom asking Hippolyta to dance, and then swells into class-blurring revelry, is enough to bring a smile to anyone's face. The dance could have continued much longer before its iron-tongued interruption -- a few seconds longer and it would have been enchanting -- but this moment is the closest the production comes to achieving sublime lift-off. The fact that it doesn't get there means it's only charming, rather than celestial.
Jim DeVita as Oberon brings a nice warmer texture to the king of the fairies by so obviously feeling the pain of Helena. His reunion with Queen Titania (Elizabeth Ledo) was amusing without being too distracting: no one ever really knows how to justify Oberon claiming after he's woken Titania up from her ass-head encounter that "thou and I are new in amity." It too demands a level of rigorous joy directors are apt to fight shy of, or throw up their hands in the face of it. Here, you basically think "what's a little night-time mischief between two immortal beings?" and sense that in the next epoch Titania will give as good as she got. DeVita's reassurances of the audience with "...as I can take it with another herb" and "I am invisible" also brought needed humor to an imperious role. (Though one wishes Daniel would have allowed Ledo to discover the visual landscape of the "forgeries of jealousy" aria more, here it comes off too pre-digested.)
All the mechanicals do yeoman's work. They convince us the real crime of these working class artisans is not incompetence, but pretension. Their antics are funny not because they're flubbing lines or tripping over scenery or doing other things no non-lobotomized actor would ever do, but because through their dunder-headed literalness they actually bumble their way into the avant-garde: "hmm, we can't actually bring in a wall, so someone's going to have to play a wall, I guess..." As Tom Snout/Wall, Nate Burger breathes great life into a few lines of dialogue, and also a noted sense of Cronenbergian body-horror as he finds himself transformed by the partition he's inhabiting. One expects this Snout fancies himself the Athenian Daniel Day-Lewis. The blossoming romance of Bottom (Sam Luis Massaro) and Quince (Sun Mee Chomet) is one of the production's highlights, along with how Daniel guides the mechanicals towards finding their collective voice as an ensemble: ridiculous, but, aesthetically-speaking, serious as a heart-attack. You almost wish the show ended with the triumphant smooch of Bottom and Quince, so amiable is their love, forged in the crucible of theatrical production.
Attention must also be paid to the brilliant moment in Theseus and Hippolyta's second scene together, when Melisa Pereyra (Hippolyta) uses her speech about hunting with Hercules and Cadmus as a way to become closer with her fiance Theseus, played by Marcus Truschinski. The way Pereyra suggestively articulated her classical scenery, and how Truschinski received the information and became unduly excited by the way in which it hit close to home, was a moment of real textual insight. That the actors and Daniel find a totally positive reading of these two personages is genuinely refreshing, and just hearing an actor like Truschinski recite the "lovers and madmen" speech has an auditory pleasure all its own.
Nothing inherently wrong exists in casting Puck as two actors (Joshua M. Castille and Casey Hoekstra), though one wishes that device could have taken better advantage of the two sides of the character's personality: the mischievous trickster ("Puck") and the caring young man he grows into ("Robin Goodfellow"). If that isn't considered, he just seems like a weird elvish guy who's the same at the end of the story as he is at the start. Via the presence of Castille, APT's continued dedication to placing ASL alongside Shakespearean verse remains an exciting and necessary venture, which will hopefully continue to expand in ways currently unimagined.
(We are also manifesting larger roles for Tim Gittings in the future, as his accomplishments as Philostrate, including being shanghaied into a choral role in 'Pyramus and Thisbe', remain stalwart as ever, and in this case, a perfectly fun way to get a sour character onto the side of joy.)
The production's weaknesses are largely of omission rather than commission. All the performances are strong, and the results are charming. The fact that it never gets airborne hardly makes it unique, though it could have been aided by having its verse articulation be less stately and measured and loved-to-death. At least it doesn't try and convince you A Midsummer Night's Dream is actually a dark and creepy play (we are spared such injustice). I may think it could have made a stronger case for joy, but sometimes being in the verbal presence of Shakespeare's words, particularly in the uniquely beautiful Spring Green amphitheater, creates its own self-sustaining justification. Until next time, we'll have to wait for a totalizing all-encompassing interpretation that "bodies forth / The forms of things unknown" and "gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." The "most rare vision" exists as written by Shakespeare, but the full assignment remains unfulfilled in our current era.
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