MIDDLING MIDSUMMER
There is not much to say about Shakespeare Northwest’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that is not encapsulated by Director Elizabeth Lundquist’s program note. She writes that the play “is one of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays and probably his most produced one.” Yes. This much is clear. Short of Hamlet, this is the go-to Shakespeare play. No outdoor Shakespeare Festival is complete without a performance of “Midsummer”. It is, in essence, a generic Shakespeare play. How fitting, then, that Shakespeare Northwest provides it with a generic production.
“I wanted to create a different time and place for this production,” Lundquist writes to her audience, “so you will see our mortals in Elizabethan garb intermixed with modern elements and fairies from a different time and age, a more industrial Victorian aesthetic.” A Steampunk Midsummer? Why not? Had Lundquist followed this instinct more completely, we might have been treated to an innovative reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s classic text. Her follow through, however, is mixed and so are the results. Never mind that the play takes place in Hellenic Athens. As Lundquist describes, the lovers and mechanicals dutifully appear in Elizabethan costume, though I could not discern the “modern elements” that were supposedly “intermixed”. The fairies, in due course, arrive clad in what appears to be light S&M bondage gear that does not exactly jibe with the sunny atmosphere in Capitol Hill’s Volunteer Park as children wearing butterfly wings run around in the background like extras from a more interesting “Midsummer”. Though Lundquist may have intended for her production to “look and feel familiar yet unknown” the result instead is complete aesthetic confusion. Furthermore, the image of young Mustardseed (a cherubic Claire Andrews), littlest of the fairies, waiting hand-and-foot on a supine Bottom (James Brown) while surrounded by adults in black corsets, lace, and high-heeled leather boots appears downright inappropriate.
Another strangely inappropriate choice concerns the lovers. As Hermia (Margaretta Lantz), Lysander (Keiran Faley), Helena (Lydia Randall), and Demetrius (Daniel Spero) become entangled in the woods, they shed their clothing, piece-by-piece. I am as open-minded as the next guy with an open mind, but this particular decision appears completely unnatural to the play or to the conditions of its performance. Literally, the actors remove an article of clothing for each of their entrances, turning Shakespeare’s play into an extended striptease or a dorm room drinking game. According to Lundquist, this is “to explore the various aspects of love and attraction.” Yet, it reads like a burlesque, the last refuge of the desperate. The mechanicals scene is discharged with its usual aplomb, but no more. When Theseus refuses their epilogue, saying “No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse,” we agree with his instincts to not prolong the play further, but we cannot help but wonder what an excuse might sound like. Tim Moriarty delivers the production’s most notable performance as Puck, imploring us if we did not like the play to imagine that we had “but slumber’d here while these visions did appear.” After watching Shakespeare Northwest’s “Midsummer”, we wish we had.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare, Directed by Elizabeth Lundquist, Shakespeare Northwest, Skagit River Shakespeare Festival, Rexville-Blackrock Amphitheatre, July 20, 26, 28, 7pm, July 22, 2pm, August 3, 10, 7pm, August 4, 1pm, August 5, 2pm. Tickets $12. For more information, see: http://www.shakesnw.org/