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A Midsummer Night’s Dream examines love and the morning after

by Leslie Wylie

If true love is blind but doesn’t realize it, false love must mistake the beer goggles of desire for corrective eyewear. But transient emotion makes the task of distinguishing love from its counterfeit, or even its absence, more difficult than it may appear.

Of course, rationality is hardly the protagonist of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this year’s Tennessee Stage Company installment of Shakespeare on the Square. “Reason and love keep little company together nowadays,” muses Bottom the Weaver, one in a cast of Shakespearean mortals who find themselves stranded in a fairy-manufactured sitcom of romance and hijinks. When the mischievous allocation of love potion forces a detour from reality through a dreamscape of misdirected lust, the notion of free-will love receives a challenge from some whimsical beyond.

The plotline itself is less complicated than it sounds. Hermia is in love with Lysander, but her father, Egeus, wants her to marry Demetrius. Helena is in love with Demetrius, who incidentally wants nothing to do with her. To avoid punishment—life in the convent—Hermia skips town with Lysander, but not before letting plans slip to Helena and, in effect, Demetrius. As if the actual drama isn’t enough, the fairy king Oberon and his jester/lieutenant Puck start tinkering around with a potion that has everyone arbitrarily falling in and out of love with one another. Pleased with their trouble-making, the fairies sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch as an evening of romantic chaos ensues.

Keeping up with the cast isn’t hard, even with several of the actors manning roles in both the fairy and human realms. Theseus (Joe Falocco), Duke of Athens, and his soon-to-be-wife Hippolyta (Susannah Devereux) open the play looking as though they’ve spent the afternoon at the golf course and/or martini bar, but a fanciful costume change has them doubling as the good-natured Oberon and stately Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies. The rude mechanicals (Josh Shuter, Kevin Velasco, W. Renee Hickman and Christopher Hoose) endure a hysterically less-than-graceful transition from bumbling screwballs into fairyhood with the addition of tutus and flowers, and then they morph again into atrocious actors for their play-within-a-play, “The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.”

The young lovers (Amy Hembree as Hermia, Colin Fisher as Lysander, Shawn Farrar as Helena and Jaques DuRand as Demetrius) each perform with an engaging earnestness; Brian Bonner does an outstanding job portraying Puck as a most endearing smart-ass; Sir Gus Maximus poignantly inhabits the identity of Starveling’s dog; and the fairies are studiously sprite. The standout performance may belong to Michael Golebiewski in his role as Bottom. His mental-patient costume only begins to suggest the histrionic madness he unfurls into each persona he embraces, be it Bottom as Weaver, Bottom as Ass or Bottom as Pyramus: The Mock-Suicidal Ham.

Overwhelmingly, director Tom Parkhill’s production ditches the temptation to incorporate elaborate pageantry for a performance that hinges sturdily upon the players’ abilities to communicate the Bard’s language itself, bringing to surface all of the wit and poetry contained therein. It’s obvious that every line of the play, down to the minutia of each word, has been cross-examined in rehearsal and reconstructed in a way that contributes to the play’s creative architecture. In addition, there is no identifiable off-limits when it comes to the players’ explorations of the text, and they shamelessly probe the limits of its low-brow, even raunchy, depths.

“What, pray, will you eat?” a smitten Titania purrs into Bottom’s donkey ear at the height of their spellbound pseudo-romance. “I could munch your good dry oats,” Bottom luridly growls back before launching into a few innocent-enough lines about how much he’d enjoy a handful or two of dried peas. Little girls in the audience giggle, and one gets the impression that although they’re not quite sure what to make of the double entendre, the players’ presentation of the lines has them convinced that they have heard something racy. This is the manner in which rogue humor is presented throughout the play, whether the humor was intended in the original content or merely removed from its context and illuminated by clever subversion.

Any dirtiness on the part of the play, however, was rivaled by an ever-increasing muddiness on the part of the soggy Market Square lawn. A week’s worth of ill-timed rain drove opening night indoors and canceled another performance altogether, but even the performances that were relocated to the dry land of concrete were rivaled by a set of human-made distractions ranging from the minor to the inexcusable (specifically, when Saturday Night on the Town led to the forced rescheduling of one evening performance to the afternoon, the city failed to close off Union Avenue, which ran directly behind the lawn, to loud Gay Street-bound construction traffic).

Nevertheless, the program’s return to the Square was welcomed by enthusiastic turnouts as a colorful reinstallation of outdoor theater into the gut center of downtown. Between the players’ competence and the brilliance of the play itself, A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes for a deliciously entertaining way to spend a midsummer evening.

July 1, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 27 © 2004 Metro Pulse