ASP's 'Midsummer' Anything But a Dream

In the second installment of a season based around ideas of change and transformation, the Actors’ Shakespeare Project (ASP) undertakes one of the Bard’s great comedies to tragically underwhelming effect. Despite brief moments of inspired hilarity, ASP’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which runs through January 24, falls short with a performance that lacks clarity and vigor.

In his program note, director Benjamin Evett references “the secret play” that lies within a traditional reading of “Midsummer”: “[It] exists somewhere within the confluence of all these people and these ingenious words.” The idea of confluence, unfortunately, does not apply to the confused design of this production. Evett has attempted to urbanize the play, but his concept does not translate to the stage effectively.

In this “Midsummer,” the Athenian characters tangled in various romantic webs are clothed as middle-class suburbanites; conversely, their mischievous fairy counterparts are dressed in alternative, urban outfits. Unfortunately, this aesthetic is poorly defined and inconsistent. Oberon, Titania, and Puck are dressed as goths, while their fairies are hip hop dancers. To boot, the scenery centers around a yellow, graffitied car that could have been plucked directly from the 1960s. This array of clashing aesthetics diminishes the show’s overall effect by confounding the audience’s sense of place and time.

Spatially, the production feels muddled as well. “Midsummer” unfolds in Midway Studios, a multi-level space replete with brick walls and fascinating architecture. It’s a venue that abounds with creative possibilities, which makes the use of space in this production feel underwhelming and conventional. John Malinowski’s lighting fails to help delineate spaces or clarify locations, the exception being an electrifying sequence in which Puck (Maurice Emmanuel Parent) enters the nighttime forest under eerie, deep-blue backlight.

Even when one looks past the baffling design elements of ASP’s “Midsummer,” there is little to redeem the production. Evett’s staging is functional, but it consistently lacks energy. Furthermore, several actors are egregiously miscast, such as Dayenne Byron Walters, who feels stiflingly rigid playing the elderly Egeus in an inexplicable and unfounded instance of cross-gender casting.

To that end, most of the performances are lackluster. Actors’ Shakespeare Project is a company dedicated to bringing the Bard’s words to life through vivid acting, but here, they fall into lame, affected performances. Their acting is more indicative than realistic as they plod through line readings and Evett’s unenergetic blocking. The resulting scenes feel dull in their predictability.

There are a few exceptions, most notably the spectacular Robert Walsh in his portrayal of Nick Bottom. Walsh is a breath of fresh air, and his presence on stage adds a kind of vitality to the show that other scenes fundamentally lack. His Bottom is a likable blue-collar guy, charmingly obnoxious and sometimes brash, but all the more endearing for his flaws.

Yet, when Bottom is transformed into a donkey, Walsh is forced to don a garish and unnecessary donkey helmet. Stuffed with found objects and capped with a mane of rainbow-colored ribbons, this hideous prop serves little function except to obscure Walsh’s facial expressions. Why try to hide the best thing the show has going for it?

Walsh does, however, find himself at the center of a truly remarkable rendition of the play’s Pyramus and Thisbe scene. Shakespeare’s purposely atrocious play-within-the-play reaches almost sublime levels of comic absurdity, and is the only scene that truly succeeds. John Kuntz—who plays a caricatured version of Peter Quince to perfection—begins the scene by acting out the play with action figures. His madcap energy fully sustains this feat until the other actors take over with even more delightfully embarrassing antics. Walsh’s Pyramus performs an intensely physical death sequence in which he literally throws himself about the stage, indefatigably acting out his demise through increasingly gruesome stunts to great effect.

Overall, this production’s strengths cannot redeem its deep-seated faults. The poorly-executed design, lethargic staging, and predictable performances make for a night of theater that is passable at best, but largely uninspiring. “Somewhere, hidden beneath the concrete layers of our presumptions,” Evett writes, “lies a new play, surprising, sweet, funny, urgent, vital. We don’t know what it looks like or sounds like, but we will know it when we see it.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, but ASP unfortunately could not find that play beneath the disarray.