Theatre in Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Resident Acting Company/Sheen Center)

	Anique Clements. Photo: Al Foote III

Whatever else one can say about this staging of William Shakespeare's evergreen comedy, it has an amusing concept. This is A Midsummer Night's Dream "as told by the Mechanicals." The action unfolds in Peter Quince's garage, where he and his merry amateur band are staging a run-through of the play, presumably before offering it to the Duke of Thebes. (That the Duke, his consort Hippolyta, and the other members of the audience are characters in the play is enough to make your head spin, but let's not get bogged down in the details.) The prospect of an Elizabethan Play that Goes Wrong is pretty enticing, especially with six actors taking on all the play's roles, swapping out headgear to help us keep track of who is who.

And, to be sure, there are several amusing touches, for example, Anique Clements as Quince, making a malaprop reference to the "Duke and Do-chess;" RJ Foster's Tom Snout, exploding with diva temperament, and Rachel Botchan's Titania, puffing on a cigarette to signal her weary sophistication. In its best moments, Bradford Cover's production radiates a sense of playful improvisation.

But A Midsummer Night's Dream is a tricky proposition, a romantic comedy with an overlay of mysticism and an unruly, almost violent undertone. Love, in Shakespeare's view, is almost alarmingly fungible, subject to all sorts of random shifts from forces both internal and external. That this tale of randomly tangled romance ends with the Mechanicals' farcical take on the tragedy Pyramus and Thisbe -- its tomb scene a twist on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, written around the same time, played for laughs -- only supports the play's rumbling theme of love's inconstancy.

Little of this comes through in the revival at the Sheen Center, which consists of a collection of comic bits assembled without thought to the play's overall pattern. In a program note, we are told that the Resident Acting Company was formed "to investigate the possibilities of what a troupe of actors could do if we worked closely together and really collaborated." The fruits of such a collaboration are not evident, as everyone seems to be working in his/her own world. More to the point, too often they signal that they are in a comedy, making funny faces and using funny voices to make sure we know when to laugh. Cast as Bottom, Austin Pendleton has his moments, especially when volunteering to take on every lead role in Pyramus and Thisbe, but at the performance I attended, he was still on book and seemed to be still finding the role. The climactic staging of Pyramus and Thisbe lacks the discipline and deadpan quality needed to get big laughs.

The characters are well-met by moonlight, thanks to Harry Feiner's lighting, which casts a spell all its own; his set is an appropriately motley collection of props and furniture pieces of the sort one might find in a garage. Evan Riley's costumes cleverly cross-breed modern and period styles.

This vest-pocket production was happily received at my performance, so there may be a diversion-seeking audience for this sort of roughhousing. But, based on the evidence here, it's better when the Mechanicals stay in their own lane. --David Barbour