Cal Shakes mounts a midsummer night’s sex comedy
“The course of true love never did run smooth,” Lysander adjures his lover, Hermia, in Act One of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it runs crookeder in this Shakespeare classic than in any other play, including The Importance of Being Earnest. It’s not just that the fairy world intersects with the human one, it’s that one character (Bottom) can’t hold onto the ears he was born with, while others wake up to discover they love people they would have pushed off a cliff before they snoozed. There’s even a play within a play, about (what else?) an additional pair of afflicted lovers. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a whirligig of a device, and it’s to Shakespeare’s credit that, though we have to suspend disbelief, we never scratch our heads. It all makes wonderfully entertaining dramatic sense.
And it’s very, very popular, which means that it’s very very familiar, so how does a theater company create it afresh? Under Shana Cooper’s direction, Cal Shakes does many inventive things with the comedy warhorse, for which Erika Chong Shuch’s striking choreography and movement design deserve much credit, especially in the magical airborne flights she devises for Titania, Queen of the Fairies, and in the many tussles that mark this production, which features more hand-to-hand dust-ups than Macbeth.
I almost said “hand-to-crotch” dustups. I never thought I’d write about that part of an actor’s anatomy, but there’s one crotch in this version that’s so swollen it looks as if it might explode any minute and take out the first three rows. It belongs to the wickedly funny Danny Scheie, who embodies Puck in his unpredictably impish style. The fact that he pokes that enhanced crotch at the audience with cocky pride (pun intended) bespeaks the production’s sexualized take on Dream, which shows up first thing in Scene One, in which Theseus, King of Athens, and his affianced, Hyppolyta, engage in a bout of sexual roughhousing that’s closer to Kung Fu than to courtship. Screeching and snarling, they throw one another around the stage, climaxing with a spot of bondage, in which Theseus ties up Hippolyta in a long white sash. Kinkily unconventional, the scene gets the play off to a sizzling start and establishes a main theme, that none of the pairs in the play are politely in love, they’re hotly in love. They roll around on the stage floor in such fits of passion that sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s on top.
All this, enhanced by Nina Ball’s woodsy set, Burke Brown’s striking lighting, Katherine O’Neill’s varied costumes, and especially by Paul James Prendergast’s wonderful music and sound design, makes for an entertaining evening: a Dream unike any you’ve seen before. The capable, up-for-anything cast includes Margo Hall (Bottom), Daisuke Tsuji (Theseus/Oberon), Erika Chong Shuch (Titania/Hippolyta), with Dan Clegg, Tristan Cunningham, Nicholas Pelczar and Lauren English as the quartet of mixed-up lovers; and Liam Vincent, James Carpenter, Catherine Castellanos and Craig Marker as the “rude mechanicals” who put on a hilarious play for the gentry.
Concluding Cal Shakespeare’s 40th season, A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays at the Bruns Amphitheater in the Orinda Hills until August 2nd. The company’s 2015 season features Twelfth Night and King Lear, as well as Calderon’s Life is a Dream and Charles Ludlam’s The Mystery of Irma Vep. For tickets.information call 548-9666 or visit www.calshakes.org.
–ROBERT HALL