Theatre in Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Classic Stage Company)

If you're going to stage one of Shakespeare's plays, you ought to pay attention to the words. This may seem like an obvious statement, but it may be news to the crew down at Classic Stage Company, where A Midsummer Night's Dream is being buried under an avalanche of shtick.

On the face of it, the project looks enticing. The director, Tony Speciale, has assembled an appealingly motley crew, including Bebe Neuwirth, indie film queen Christina Ricci, downtown drag performer Taylor Mac, and Anthony Heald, a much-missed mainstay of the New York stage making a welcome return after 16 years. The set designer, Mark Wendland, has outdone himself, placing an enormous, tilted mirror upstage, which contains a number of hidden openings, the better to admits fairies, nymphs, and a blizzard of flower petals. When the court of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, assembles, they writhe on the ground, their movements reflected in the mirror, rather like the June Taylor Dancers.

The production begins on an appealingly odd note, as Theseus, Duke of Athens, presents his intended, the warrior Hippolyta, to his court. The atmosphere is stormy, Hippolyta is definitely not amused, and an unsettled air prevails; when Theseus proposes a toast, it is met with silence and Hippolyta looks as if she might fling her drink in his face. It makes for a graceful segue to the next sequence, which introduces the play's mismatched young lovers. If in their dress and manners Hermia, Lysander, Helena, and Demetrius come off as refugees from the set of Gossip Girl, it only suggests the possibility of a fresh take on a centuries-old romantic comedy. There's a clever moment when Hermia, having run away from her tyrant father, meets up with her lover Lysander; you have to wonder how far they'll get, given the enormous rollaboard and additional pieces of hand baggage she is dragging.

The bad news sets in with the appearance of the rude mechanicals as they plan to present the "most lamentable comedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe. As Bottom, who is cast as Pyramus -- and who is only too willing to take on all the other roles, as well -- Steven Skybell displays an alarming lack of control. Not yet turned into an ass, he is already braying his lines; what should be a spoof of ham acting becomes the real thing, a high-pressure, hard-sell performance that practically begs the audience to laugh. Next up is Mac's Puck, trolling for laughs in a series of elaborate, and elaborately unfunny, costumes -- he enters at different times dressed as a tree, in a blue dirndl and apron, and in a garish pink elephant outfit. He wears the last seated in a lawn chair next to Oberon, King of the Fairies, as they watch the young lovers run amok in the forest. Through an opening in the mirror, someone hands them bags of popcorn and sodas; if you think that's adorable, this is the Midsummer for you.

The most lamentable comedy continues as the four lovers carry on like the understudies in Don't Dress for Dinner, shrieking, leaping, mugging, and generally making asses of themselves. Both Ricci, as Hermia, and Halley Wegryn Gross, as Helena, speak in tiny little-girl voices; when they scream their lines, the effect is painful to the ears. Nick Gehlfuss, as Demetrius, and Jordan Dean, as Lysander, show real facility with Shakespeare's verse, but they're so busy brawling and tumbling that the words never get a chance. Later, when all four are asleep, Puck strips them down to their underwear; struggling to pull the pants off one of the men, he snaps, "Goddamn skinny jeans!" (How hip!) As Titania, Neuwirth is not spared. It's not enough that we see her, under the influence a spell, fall for Bottom in the guise of an ass; Puck produces a large piece of China silk that covers the stage, and under it they engage in what clearly sounds like interspecies sex. A little later, the silk is pulled up to reveal the four younger lovers, in their briefs, piled on top of each other in a manner that suggests the aftermath of four-way sex. They are discovered this way by Theseus and Egeus, Hermia's father. Since the two older men previously threatened Hermia with the convent for refusing to marry Demetrius, their rather blasé reaction to her current state is surprising, to say the least. There are, happily, a few nice moments in the presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe," largely thanks to the delicately rendered Francis Flute of David Greenspan, but the effect is spoiled by Skybell, who turns Pyramus' death scene into a one-man festival of mugging.

Given all this self-congratulatory gagging, I began to feel I was back at Godspell. Speciale's approach is suggestive of a director who thinks he has a real stinker of a play on his hands, one that he had better tart up as much as possible with distracting bits of business. I can't begin to say how wrongheaded this is. Not only is A Midsummer Night's Dream a great comedy, but its laughter is informed by darkness, a pained awareness of the fickle nature of passion and the cruelties that people commit in the name of love. It's about romantic love as a profoundly disruptive force, not an excuse for sitcom smirking. It's also not a script that must be treated with reverence. In the 2007 staging at the Delacorte, the scenes with the mechanicals, led by Jay O. Sanders' Bottom, slayed continuously; I also have lovely memories of Royal Shakespeare Company's mid-'90s production, with the supremely funny Bottom of Desmond Barrit. Both stagings exercised a considerable amount of comic license without coarsening the play.

There are some lovely things in this Midsummer Night's Dream, if you're willing to look. As Theseus and Oberon, Heald's facility with the verse is a joy. Greenspan's bemused Francis Flute, who stands apart from the others, is an original, and there are refreshingly low-key contributions from Rob Yang as Peter Quince and Chad Lindsey as Tom Snout. Tyler Micoleau's lighting is unfailingly beautiful; M. Florian Staab's sound design and the original music by Christian Frederickson and Ryan Rumery are totally solid. (I'm of two minds about Andrea Lauer's costumes; the chic garden-party wear for the Athenian court is nicely done, but the anything-goes ragbag approach to the court of the fairies is as labored as anything else in the production.)

Honesty compels me to report that the audience laughed through most of the show and rewarded the cast with a lusty ovation at the end. To my mind, however, they weren't enjoying A Midsummer Night's Dream, but a director's inferior gloss on the text. In past seasons, CSC has done great work with Shakespeare's histories and tragedies; this Midsummer suggests that his comedies may not be the company's forte.--David Barbour