A Midsummer Night’s Dream (review)

Many of the actors in Joanna Settle’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are first generation Americans (entirely by chance, according to the director), and the cast resembled the racial diversity of a large American city: African-American, Vietnamese-American, Iranian-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American. When Puck and Oberon argued about the confusion of the lovers, they suddenly launched into a heated argument in Spanish. Doan Ly’s Titania spat out several lines of verse in Vietnamese to curse Oberon. The production was not about racial diversity, but rather about the borderlands that actors in the Dream must inhabit. Settle’s Dream exposed the liminal spaces of the play. The traditional dichotomy of “the fairy world” and “the mortal world” dissolved before our very eyes. The audience was often treated to a Brechtian peek behind the veil of illusion when we saw Puck and Oberon not only as Shakespeare’s characters, but also as first generation Mexican-American actors as well. The doubling of Titania and Hippolyta, Oberon and Theseus, and Puck and Philostrate accentuated the fluidity and release of the characters: by the end of the play the actors were shape-shifting, almost playing both characters at once. The wonderful, lyrical score by Stew (Tony award-winning composer of Passing Strange) was also a mixture of American styles, folk, blues and jazz, and each character had a musical “theme” that served to expose the fairy life beneath the mortal. Though this production of the play owed a debt to Jung’s theories of dreams, ultimately the interpretation was driven by the identities and talents of the actors and the location of the performance.

The production company, Shakespeare on the Sound, performs in two venues, both of which sit on a plot of green next to the Long Island Sound. The first space, at Pinkney Park in Rowayton, Connecticut, is nestled in a natural amphitheatre next to a tributary of the Sound. The second venue, at Baldwin Park in Greenwich, Connecticut is a flatter expanse on a quaint harbor. The designer, Andrew Lieberman, capitalized on the natural elements of the parks in creating the set. A long, serpentine boardwalk ending in a three-way intersection snaked its way through the park. Footlights illuminated the actors when the natural light of the sun disappeared and fireflies twinkled in the night sky. The boardwalk sloped along the curve of the shoreline, suggesting the “beached margent of the sea” where the fairies dance. The audience sat around the boardwalk. At the intersection, large trees hovered over the boardwalk providing Puck and Oberon a place to watch the action, and an escape for Helena when Demetrius and Lysander pursued her. This intersection was the place of Titania’s Bower and the gentle sloping of the boardwalk allowed Bottom to be pushed unceremoniously head over heels out of the bower—a physical tour de force for the actor and a true recognition that Bottom’s expulsion from Titania’s bower is a kind of fall from grace. His forearms were covered with sleeves ending in horseshoes, and these click-clacked on the boardwalk at each revolution down the hill; at each dejected turn he brayed mournfully.

The actors’ bodies did the transformative work of the play (costumes were monochromatic and vaguely modern), and the production announced this intention in its very first image. Illuminated on the boardwalk, Puck entered to a jazzy Latin beat and the music stirred his body to a salsa step as he sashayed toward and through the audience. The production highlighted the bestial qualities of the characters in...