Middling 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Opens

STRATFORD, Conn.--The Midsummer Night's Dream with which the American Shakespeare Festival has opened its thirteenth season is hardly a dream of a production. But then it is also far from being a midsummer nightmare--just a middlingly pleasant couple of hours.

Disappointment is strongest when I look back at the vibrant version that the late Jack Landau put together for the Festival in 1958. I had hoped that the new production would duplicate the virtues of the old; but it falls far short.

One cannot take the easy way out and put the blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings down to manual laborers. And on this work he lavished lots of his loveliest language.

(Ed. Note--"A Midsummer Night's Dream" plays through Sept. 10 in alternation with "The Merchant of Venice" and Anouilh's "Antigone," with "Macbeth" joining the repertory on July 25. The other productions will be reviewed in subsequent issues. The drive to the picturesque grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpikle to Exist 32. Performances tend to begin promptly at 2:30 and 8:30 in the air-conditioned Festival Theatre, and wandering minstrels perform a half hour before curtain time. There are free facilities for picnickers on the grounds.)

No, the trouble lies elsewhere. And it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Cyril Ritchard is invited to play the rich comic part of Bottom the Weaver. Now you will recall that Bottom and his five fellow artisans are preparing to act out the tale of Pyramus and Thisby as part of the entertainment at the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. Bottom is assigned the role of Pyramus. Uncontent, he pleads, "Let me play the lion too." He is restricted to Pyramus, but the idea is planted.

The notion then goes from Ritchard's Bottom to his head. "I get to play Bottom and Pyramus," thinks Richard, "but why should I stop at two roles?" So he announces, "Let me play Oberon too--or methinks I won't play at all." Believing that a loaf and a half is better than none, the powers-that-be agree to pencil him in as king of the fairies too.

Ah, but there's one hitch. The doubling of Bottom and Oberon is quite possible--except for one critical scene well along in the play (IV, i), where Bottom, with his noggin transformed into an ass' head, and Oberon must both appear and speak on stage. We are told that Anthony of Padua, Philip Neri and other saints of eld were capable of bilocation. Are they now to be joined by Saint Cyril? The suspense is hardly bearable; and the answer turns out to be: yes, apparently. Bottom appears; yes, it's Ritchard's voice all right. Titaniz puts him to sleep. Oberon enters and does his stuff; Ritchard, unmistakabley. Bottom awakes, the ass' head comes off, and, sure enough, there's Ritchard, prattling away as nicely as you please about not knowing his ass from a mole in the ground.

I shan't reveal how it's done. Suffice it to say that we are the victim of an ingenious, even brilliant, stunt. But we are so concerned over the prestigiation and sleight-of-body that we can give no heed to the play. We have become watchers at a mere carnival side-show. The audience's natural reaction to all this is recounted at great and amusing length in Walter Kerr's review for the New York Times. As Keats did not quite say, "Was it aversion, or a waking Dream?" At any rate, as he did say, "Fled is that music."

Having answered, "Bottom, Bottom, who's got the Bottom?," we have not yet got to the bottom of the trouble. You will remember that Quince the Carpenter is the nominal director of the show that the artisans are readying, but that Bottom keeps trying to take over as boss himself. Rising to the bait again, Ritchard insists not only on playing three roles but also on directing the entire production. And he is allowed to have his way.

One could, I suppose, react to this doubling-in-brash approach as Doctor Johnson did to a woman's preaching and a dog's walking on his hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The point, however, is that such theatrical vaunting should not be done at all; in fact, it should be categorically proscribed by international law.

The player of a leading stage role ougth never to be entrusted with the direction of the production. Never? Never! There is no qualifying Gilbert-and-Sullivan "well, hardly ever" about it. I don't care how gifted a person is in acting and directing; he should not be permitted to wear both hats at once. And this applies just as much to Olivier as to Ritchard. On occasion Olivier has achieved an impressive result with a work he has both supervised and acted in; but there have nonetheless always been flaws that a separate director could have corrected.

It ought to be obvious that a man playing a part cannot see his own performance as an audience does. Not only this, but he cannot adequately judge the performances of the other players with whom he is acting and (one hopes?) interacting on stage. A production needs to be seen as a whole; and this demands perspective and objectivity. It was for this reason that the job of directed evolved in the first place--and, analogously, that the orchestral conductor superseded the head-bobbing harpsichordist or violin list. Is the indulging of theatrical egotism and arrogance worth a return to the old-time lack of focus, balance, and precision? Both Sir Laurence and Saint Cyril should attend to wending their ways by mending their maze.

In the present instance, it should come as no surprise that Ritchard's Dream is diffuse and disoriented. It needed, and needs, a full-time director. As an actor, Ritchard does make a credible Oberon, imbuing him with a fitting amount of hauteur and mockery. His Bottom, though cockney, is not cocksure; it is too bland and superficial. This is a pity, for Bottom is the first of Shakespeare's great comic creations.

Of the rest of the "mechanicals," only Tom Aldridge's Quince emerges as a fully formed character. And when he delivers the prologue before the Pyramus playet, he has a grand time with the alliterative avalanche of b's. The other cronies are passable. The whole sextet of artisans is just no match for their counterparts in the 1958 production: Morris Carnovsky, Hiram Sherman, Ellis Rabb, William Hickey, Will Geer, and Severn Darden.

The current crop, though, does manage to bring to the Pyramus interlude a good deal of humor, albeit of a highly slapstick sort. Pyramus' whacking of Wall (Robert Frink) on the chest elicits a cloud of plaster dust. And when Thisby (Mylo Quam) says, "Come, trusty sword," she repeats the line, whereupon the "dead" Pyramus hands her his own sword, with which she then proceeds to stab herself with studied phoniness under the armpit. (Ritchard has, in fact, introduced throughout the whole show a lot of business straight out of vaudeville and the music-hall.)

Jane Farnol, who plays Oberon's fairy queen, Titania, has a problem with here sibilants, but also has the pleasure of actually flying in through the air on a bowery cloud, looking for all the world like some goddess in a Baroque opera. Theseus (Myles Eason) and his fiancee Hippolyta (Marilyn McKenna) are forgettable portrayals; in fact, I've forgotten them.

The play, being a Renaissance-styled script, has other symmetrically balanced pairs in its cast. The young lovers Demetrius (John Cunningham) and Lysander (Ted Graeber?) are admirably matched, the crisp delivery of the former matching the sonorous timbre of the latter. It is not their fault that they fail to convey much individuality; Shakespeare was interested in their situations, not their personalities.

Their female counterparts, Hermia and Helena, emerge woefully lopsided in performance. Diana Davila's Hermia has an unpleasant voice that an occasion indulges in pure squeal- ing; and she doesn't seem to understand what she is mouthing much of the time. Dorothy Tristan's Helena shows a wider vocal range and considerable skill as a farceuse. When she pleads to Demetrius, "Give me leave...to follow you," she waddles on her knees with comic aggressiveness; and when Lysander describes himself as "touching now the point of human skill," she instinctively grasps her breasts in self-protection.

The mischievous elf Puck is the thread that weaves in and out of the several plots and groups of characters, and holds the work together. For this, Jerry Dodge is unflaggingly admirable. When he says, "And here the maiden, sleeping sound,/ On the dank and dirty ground," his way of dropping vocal pitch on the second line is hilarious. He darts about like lightning, and scampers up a tree as easily as a cat. Indeed, at the core of his performance are postures, gestures, and movements drawn from classical ballet. Although he is understandably not in a class with Arthur Mitchell, who is so extraordinary a Puck in the ballet version of the tale, he is still a splendidly equipped dancer and mime as well as actor.

To James Valentine are entrusted two small roles. As Hermia's father Egeus, he has been directed to overplay disastrously by means of a wheezing delivery. A little of this goes a long way, but he turns the theatre for a while into a vertiable asthma clinic. He also turns Philostrate, master of the revels, into an amusingly effete redhead.

Visually, the production has much to delight the audience, though there is nothing to suggest the Athens specified in the text. William and Jean Eckart have designed a set of six tall white poles, to which are added holed panels, like cheese slices, and fluted sails for the court scenes. When affairs shift to the woods, a trainload of glittering white plastic streamers hangs down like so much Spanish moss.

Robert Fletcher has garbed the aristocracy in Empire costumes of the Napoleonic period, with an emphasis on brown, white, and gold. The two love-smitten maidens wear identical low-necked, high-waisted white gowns, with a blue sash for Helena and a pink one for Hermia. The "mechanicals" are outfitted in rough reds, oranges, and yellows. Fletcher had, paradoxically, a field day with the forest folk--Titania and her fairies in green and pink, the bicorn Oberon and his winged retinue in sequined blues.

Tharon Musser has provided lovely lambent lighting, though its technical execution is distractingly jerky. At one point, taking a cue from Titania's words--"The moon methinks looks with a wat'ry eye;/ And when she weeps, weeps every little flower"--she has all the pendent vegetation come alive with tiny lachrymal lights, while the fairies march out carrying hand torches. A beautiful way to end the show's first half.

Conrad Susa's music for the several dances, songs, and general background is pleasant enough, though it certainly cannot be accused of subtlety (but, then, neither can Mendelssohn's marvelous score). I do wish he had not had recourse, for the shimmering fairies, to the vibraphone; this is too easy, and I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the instrument is inherently vulgar. Susa's score does not come up to the one Marc Blitzstein wrote for the 1958 production. (It is sadly ironic that Blitzstein and director Jack Landau, who contributed so much to the joyous success of the earlier show, have both since become victims of bizarre, brutal murders.)

Near the play's conclusion, Theseus states, "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact." In the current version, there's plenty of lunacy, plenty of love, but precious little poetry. For this Cyril Ritchard must be held largely responsible. He should have faced up to the fact that his attempt to do almost everything himself was, like his own anatomy, characterized by an inability to see his own Bottom