A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Theatre for a New Audience (Polonsky Shakespeare Centre) (review)

Is it possible to love a production of Shakespeare without loving the acting? Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the opening performance at the Theatre for a New Audience’s new Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, did not get as much out of its cast, with one exception, as it might. But even without always doing justice to the language, the production presented imaginative, sometimes dizzying stuff. Working more with images than words, and less emotionally human than most productions of Shakespeare, Taymor’s show dazzled the eyes without straining the heart. We may prefer the denser entanglements provided by more language-driven productions, but this interpretation provided (perhaps unintentionally?) an experiment in how much the eye can do alone.

It started on a solitary bed. The show began with an elaborate staging of a curtain rising. Puck (Kathryn Hunter) climbed onto the stage with an awkward androgynous gait that would be one of the most memorable elements of this show. She tucked herself in to sleep. Four brawny mechanicals came on stage in modern auto-mechanic dress, wearing costumes from the outer boroughs of New York (including a Brooklyn Nets cap), and attached pulleys to the bed’s four sheet-corners. The four ropes were then cranked to transform the sheet into a stage-covering curtain/parachute. The bed and the expanse of white fabric were next mysteriously elevated to the top of a platform of intertwined tree branches. The branches were hewn away with chainsaws by the mechanicals, allowing the bed-in-chute to ascend to the ceiling with its Puckish inhabitant inside before the rest of the play really began.

It was not Shakespeare, necessarily, but it was gorgeous. The vertical allegory appeared clear enough—the play ascends into imagination—but the simplicity was captivating to watch. (My just-turned-eleven-year-old daughter in the seat next to me gasped when Puck flew up to the ceiling.) In some ways the stage props, especially the wires that enabled Puck to fly, the balloon-parachute in which the fairy ascended, and the mobile bamboo poles that represented the forest, were the stars of the show. The staging also provided lots of sound and light, including a lovely series of flowers-in-bloom projected onto the rear stage during Bottom’s erotic fantasia in Titania’s bower, but the less illusionistic moments—the moments in which the visible presence of stage business reminded the audience that theater is a symbolic, not a realistic, medium—seemed most affecting to me. When Bottom manipulated the jaws of his ass’s head, he used what looked like a pair of jumper cables, and the visible transformation of the commonplace was perfect. The partial mismatch of the high cultural lyricism of Shakespeare’s play with Taymor’s omnivorous visual invention drove the...