A Midsummer Night's Dream (review)

Mu Performing Arts is a Twin Cities artistic company that, according to its mission statement, "creates theater and taiko from the heart of the Asian-American experience." Its production of A Midsummer Night's Dream was artistic director Rick Shiomi's first solo foray into Shakespeare with the company. Shiomi combined various Asian theatrical, musical, and dance traditions with reverence for Shakespeare's language and evident delight in the play as festive comedy. Though the production was thematically and interpretively conventional, the stylistic innovations worked superbly to underscore the standard themes, such as the vagaries and foolishness of love, the incapacity of reason before love, and human susceptibility to love.

The production's several styles enhanced different elements of the play: Theseus's court was, according to Shiomi's brief program note, set in "an imaginary version of Japan during the Meiji Era of the late nineteenth century, when the country was both modernizing and westernizing;" the evocation of Japan's encounter with the west and modernity illuminated a parallel movement in the play's Athenian court—a transition from law and tradition to progress, generosity, and love. This theme was mirrored in the costumes: for instance, in the opening scene Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus wore traditional Japanese garb; the young lovers appearing at court wore period western clothes with short Japanese robes thrown over them; and Helena, who was not in the first scene, wore only nineteenth-century western clothes, indicating her break with the past as she pursued her own desires from the very first moment she was on stage. In addition, among a largely Asian-American cast Lysander was played by a white actor, a bit of nontraditional casting that in the context of the court milieu further radicalized Hermia's desire for him and his for her. In contrast to the court, the fairy realm was loosely drawn from what Shiomi called "a Korean folk tale world." The production employed Japanese taiko drumming (visible offstage right) and Korean mask dance in its construction of the magical midsummer night. An extratextual, masked spirit of mischief—modeled on the Chwibari or prankster mask of Korean origin—opened the play with a dance, appeared again at the end, and was ultimately shooed offstage by Puck, just before his (or in this case her) famous epilogue.

The set was elegantly simple and equally clarifying: flexible enough to be used for other purposes, such as some of the chase scenes, the fairy queen's bower was situated upstage right. Theseus's Athenian court was located upstage left and was also often occupied by Oberon and Puck, thereby underscoring thematic connections between the human duke and the fairy king. The lower steeply raked central platform served as the locus of the main actions and confusion, both at court and in the forest. A wooded backdrop also appeared in the distant rear of the playing area. In some comic scenes this forested distance was used to great effect: the chases in which Puck wearied the muddled lovers and "rude mechanicals" often humorously upstaged the action on the central platform as Lysander or Demetrius, Flute or Peter Quince, pursued their delusions.

Figure 1.

Center: Jeany Park as Titania and Eric Sharp as Nick Bottom. Clockwise from left: Sandy'ci Moua, Sara Baber, Mai Yeev Vang as Fairies in the Mu Performing Arts production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photographer...