‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’ at Harlequin Productions
by Alec ClaytonOriginally published in The News Tribune (Tacoma) Sept. 25, 2006
Harlequin Production’s founder and director, Scot Whitney has pulled together many diverse and unique elements to make their performance of "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" the best production of this play I have ever seen.
First, and most audaciously, he has made it into a musical with original music composed by Bruce Whitney; with choreography by Danielle Brosco. In lesser hands, this might be gimmicky, if not downright insulting to Shakespeare. But the way Harlequin does it, you might wonder why it hasn’t been done a thousand times before.
Then they took a chance with young actors, many still in middle and high school, to play the young lovers and fairies. (Anya Johnson, who plays Helena, is a junior at Olympia High School. She began her acting career at age five with the Washington Shakespeare Festival. Jordan Rosin as Demetrius is a student at Todd Beamer High School in Federal Way.) Whitney paired these youthful actors with seasoned actors including Jason Haws and Dennis Rolly, veterans of many Harlequin shows; and two equity actors, Brian Gillespie and Mari Nelson, who have extensive stage experience. (Nelson has had lead roles on Broadway in "Guys and Dolls" and "Six Degrees of Separation" and Gillespie is a veteran of the Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival).
Add to this Jill Carter’s beautiful but simple set with a revolving stage and hanging curtains that actors swing on like trapeze artists, and dramatic lighting (including disorienting strobe effects) by Nat Rayman, and you have a magical comedy that is contemporary and innovative while remaining true to Shakespeare’s vision.
In many ways, "Midsummer" is a comic-fantasy version of "Romeo and Juliet," but with four sets of lovers and minus all the pathos. It even contains a play-within-a-play (a Shakespearean hallmark) that is, itself, a retelling of the story of Romeo and Juliet, but with the lovers renamed Pyramus and Thisbe.
Four love stories are woven together and further complicated with surrealistic dreams and visions, and fairies that cast love spells on humans and turn one man into an ass. As complicated as this may seem, the story is easy to follow.
Theseus, duke of Athens (Gillespie, who also plays the fairy king Oberon), is in love with the Amazon queen Hippolyta (Nelson, who doubles as the fairy queen Titania). She loves him too, but being of proud royalty in her own right, she resents his authority over her. Egeus (Rolly) asks the duke to make his daughter, Hermia (Amy Hill) honor his wish that she marry Demetrius (Jordan Rosin). But Hermia is in love with Lysander (Paul Purvine) and her best friend, Helena (Anya Johnson) is in love with Demetrius. Theseus rules that Hermia has three choices: marry Lysander, enter a convent and become a nun, or be killed. Lysander and Hermia escape into a forest inhabited by magical fairies ruled by the fairy king Oberon and his wonderfully mischievous henchman, Puck (Brian Claudio Smith). Oberon has had a falling out with his queen. He orders Puck to drop a magic potion into her eye while she sleeps. The potion will make her fall in love with the first person she sees when she wakes up.
Meanwhile, a troupe of absurdly stupid thespians is rehearsing a play in the forest by the light of the moon. The troupe is directed by Peter Quince (also played by Rolly), and their lead actor is a ludicrously histrionic fool named Bottom (Haws). Puck casts a spell on Bottom, turning him into a braying ass, which is to say making a metaphor literal. And it is Bottom, now transformed into a donkey, that Titania first sees and falls in love with when she awakens.
Puck is having so much fun casting spells on the hapless humans that he then drops the potion into the eyes of both Demetrius and Lysander, making them both fall madly in love with Helena. She may have been somewhat smitten with Demetrius earlier, but this is more than she can stand. She runs away, and they both chase after her. Hermia gets into the act, and the four young lovers tear one another’s clothes off and chase after each other in bloomers and clownish shorts on the revolving stage in a madcap scene reminiscent of the Three Stooges.
Eventually the spells are removed by Puck on the orders of Oberon. Everyone wakes from their dreams, and the lovers are wed in a climactic scene with the actors performing the story of Pyramus and Thisbe at the wedding -- a play that ends with Bottom performing what has to be the longest death scene in the history of the stage. He dies and he dies and he dies; he dies upstage and he dies downstage, and out in the audience. And by the time he finally expired, my jaw was so sore from laughing I couldn’t laugh anymore. Haws should get a Tony for this scene alone.
I highly recommend Harlequin Production’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream."
alec@alecclayton.com
© 2006 by Alec Clayton