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[THEATER REVIEW] MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at SHAKESPEARE & CO.
7.1.07
SHAKESPEARE & COMPANY
A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare
Directed by Eleanor Holdridge
running through September 2, 2007
Founders' Theatre
review by SETH ROGOVOY, editor-in-chief and critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING Magazine
(Lenox, Mass., June 23, 2007) -- Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the signature works by Shakespeare & Company over the years, is being given a puzzling production this summer in the Founders' Theatre.
Ostensibly transferred to early 19th-century Greece (huh?), the piece plays like a series of disconnected vignettes across time and space. When the "mechanicals" gather to plan their play-within-a-play, they seem to be a group out of the American Wild West in a saloon. Theseus, Hippolyta, Philostrate and the other ostensible Greeks seem more like colonial Englishmen. Only the fairies of the woods seem like who they are meant to be, but even at that, they lack the typical magical element that has so inspired past productions of this summertime favorite by this company.
A lack of standout talent also hinders the nearly three-hour production that also lacks the typical wit and technical theatricality that typically informs all plays staged at Shakespeare & Company. Though there are a few exceptions -- notably Nigel Gore's Nick Bottom, and Julie Webster's Hermia -- the rest of the cast is at best serviceable, or at worst second-rate. One wonders what has happened to the first rank of the company's corps -- perhaps they're otherwise engaged.
So what we're left with is a sadly decimated cast in a production in search of a center. There is no center in this Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead there are disconnected scenes that play like set pieces from wildly different productions, none of which, however, achieve the standard of stagecraft we have come to expect from a Shakespeare & Company work, especially one so identifiably central to the company's identity.
In the end, this Midsummer Night's Dream seems like an afterthought, thrown together with little verve or imagination, perhaps in a season where the company's resources are mostly reserved for the Tom Stoppard farce Rough Crossing and, presumably, Antony and Cleopatra, which doesn't open for several more weeks.
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