Midsummer Night's Dream

When I was fourteen and a collector of comic books in New York, I used to go downtown to a dirty loft its owners called The Memory Shop to trade early Batman comics for early Dick Tracy with a tough truck driver from St. Louis who fell by every month or so. He was tall and unshaven and sweaty, so it surprised me the first time when his voice revealed him a gentle nervous faggot. I would have forgotten him had I not seen him reincarnated last night as Flute, the Bellows-mender, later Thisbe, both parts executed by Woody Wickham with the innate grace of a Hasty Pudding veteran. Director Tim Mayer knows, among countless other things, something of the deceptive nature of initial appearance; the show's greatness rests largely on his refusal to submit to seductive archetype. Those of you who know Bottom as a goodhearted if demented bumbler, Puck as a juvenile sprite, Theseus as a wise Shakespearian justice, or Hippolyta as a content and passive fiancee, are due for the nicest kind of surprise; for in troubling to treat A Midsummer Night's Dream to a "new adaptation," Mayer has restored to us a worthy (and terribly funny) text in which many of us, I would wager, long ago lost interest.

Most noticeable (and most refreshing) is the refusal of Mayer and his cast to take the dialogue at face value: actors create their own speech rhythms, throw away phrases with alarming frequency, emphasize unexpected words to hilarious effect and happily screw around with the sacred meter of the verse.

Of course the verse is not sacred; what is sacred is the communication of Mayer through the text through the sound and movement on his stage to the audience watching the play. What counts here is not fidelity to convention, but rightness, and the Summer Players are, to my mind, right 99 per cent of the time. When Demetrius (Vincent Canzoneri) tossed "And, by the way, let us recount our dreams" to the audience upon exiting, an audible explosion of surprised laughter and applause arose as we realized we'd never known the line could be read like that and, of course, it's the right way to read the line. It happens a hundred and fifty times.

And it's wonderful--the clarity of language and the play's comic potential are unfolded in the exciting and inventive reinterpreation of dialogue and characterization, reinterpretation remaining faithful to Shakespeare's intent in its bawdy humor, essential ambiguity, and emphasis on magic. Reviewing Orson Welles' film Falstaff, the Crimson's Peter Jaszi attributed to Welles "a single overriding concern: to make the text, both the words and the visual images implicit in them, wholly and completely his own, and thereby to make them ours." This can, with A Midsummer Night's Dream, be said of Mayer, and his success is very much our gain.

But Mayer's combined respect for and ability to manipulate the audience does not entirely result in our being able to sit back and laugh for 2 1/2 hours, and his vision of the all-too-real dream incorporates terror, coruption of the flesh, and the inadequacy of the bonds between the combinations of lovers. Here the Summer Players' production is less accessible, and without dwelling on interpretation best left to each of you, I would quietly and seriously suggest that Mayer has invested something of his heart and soul in the show. Also that the terror inherent in the confrontation of the fairies with the oncoming dawn goes beyond interpretive rightness and suggests a vision of dimension and paradox not easily dismissable; also that the emphasis on Helena's "And I have found Demetrius like a jewel/Mine own, and not mine own" and Paul Schmidt's delivery of Oberon's "Her dotage now I do begin to pity" speech suggest an individual and serious attitude about love and love-making; also that the third-act curtain (which I won't ruin by describing) and the corresponding images at the end of Act Five are bittersweet and moving contrasts in which magical and real interchange, each left with its share of advantage over the other, each doomed to a certain sadness according to the inevitable dictates of its life-style.

Costumed with successful eclecticism by Sarah Gates and played on Howard Cutler's elegant and functional set, all the cameras, flashlights, modern tunes, and anachronistic props, however funny, cannot take the show away from its brilliant and dedicated cast. Dean Gitter's fascinating Bottom remains the most difficult performance to fathom: his "wit" in the scenes with Titania almost passes for just that, and his death scene as Pyramus reveals Bottom, unbelievably, a capable actor--capable at least of temporarily affecting Theseus and Hippolyta, played superbly by Tommy Lee Jones and Lynette Saxe.

The lovers, particularly Thomas Babe and Joan Tolentino (Hermia and Lysander) evoked consistent and deserved laughter from the happy Opening Night audience, as did Avreml (Avreml!?) Friedman as a Yiddish Peter Quintz.

Paul Schmidt (Oberon) and Maeve Kinkead (Titania) played their roles relatively straight with precision and intelligence. Which leaves Susan Channing's bi-sexual, jealous, and somewhat perturbed Puck, and if you don't know by now what watching Susan Channing on stage is like, I suggest you find out fast.

At Agassiz you will discover something of Shakespeare's world and something of Tim Mayer's and when Puck sings Mayer's song to the audience,

And surely you've all seen me too

Grinning out of your dreaming at you

While you'll never like me much

We ought to keep in touch

we can learn from it. And you will laugh like hell at something you never though you'd laugh at again. When you saw the posters in the Square, you thought, "I don't want to see another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. You were wrong. You do want to see another production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.