'Midsummer Night's Dream' mixes light and darkness at ART
CAMBRIDGE -- There is a delightful perversity at work in scheduling "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the frigid midwinter, and for commissioning a set that looks more suitable for "Macbeth" than for "Midsummer."
But even if this American Repertory Theatre outing is her first stab at Shakespeare, director Martha Clarke knows what she's doing. It has become common practice since the 1960s to explore the darker shade of Shakespeare, but there is nothing common about Clarke's version.
With fairies flying about the elongated horizontal stage and the ART company performing slap-happy slapstick, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" mixes light and darkness so deftly that it's often hard to tell which is which. The humiliations to which mortal men and women are subjected here are both hilarious and reprehensible. Our melodramatic swoons over love are both poetic and pathetic.
Reigning over both the Athenian lovers and the fairy kingdom are the two characters played by John Campion, who authoritatively turns both Theseus and Oberon into authoritarian, godlike figures. Both think they can dictate the passions of their subjects; both learn, like Prospero in "The Tempest," that perhaps it's better to get out of the way and let human nature take its course.
The Athenian king, Theseus, has forced two young lovers, Hermia and Demetrius, to take flight because she is promised to Lysander. Lysander in turn is adored by Helena -- the more she chases the more he runs; the more he runs, the more she chases. As all four flee into Fairyland, Oberon tries to make things right between the couples, but makes them even worse.
As in most modern versions, the lovers find themselves not in Fairyland but in Freudland. Their midsummer dreams are the fantasies of the unconscious, freed from the banality of convention -- here not only the custom of arranged marriage, but that of romantic love. The world they travel in is a landscape so dark and full of literal pitfalls that it would look like the setting for a horror film if there weren't all those pretty fairies flying about, hoisted by pulleys and ropes.
Our animal instincts trump our human institutions. As Oberon's henchman who drives the comedy forward, Puck is neither good nor bad but an imp of the perverse (Jesse J. Perez plays him like a meld of Alice Cooper and The Crow). Drama and comedy here are strange bedfellows, not polar opposites, symbolized most potently in this production by Karen MacDonald, in a sparkling dual performance as Oberon's Fairy Queen Titania and Theseus's wife, Hippolyta. The mortal woman is merely a dishrag, while Titania wants her share of the keys to the kingdom.
Titania's fairy attendants swoop and somersault around the stage like erotic angels, casting a magic that's both a sensual delight and symbolic of spirits in the material world. Robert Israel's stark set is aided no end by James Ingalls's imaginative lighting, which is dark but multi-shaded. David Remedios's sound and Richard Peaslee's music add to the strange glow.
The ART company has not been in the forefront of Loeb productions these past two seasons, so it's a pleasure to see the five remaining members dominate the proceedings in this one. In addition to MacDonald's supremely self-confident turn, Thomas Derrah is a Bottom who'd be hard to top. He's more Chaplinesque here than when he played Charlie a few years ago. Bottom is the lead actor of the bizarre play-within-a-play about Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare had fun in this sequence satirizing the practice of having men play women, but probably no more than Remo Airaldi has, playing Francis Flute/
Thisbe as a sex-starved fellow of indeterminate gender preference. Throw in Will LeBow as their nervous artistic director and Jeremy Geidt as the befuddled Lion and it seems like old times at the ART. And with ART/Moscow Art Theatre Institute students Will Peebles and Jonathan Broke, there's hope for the future as well. In any production featuring Clarke choreography and Institute trainees, you can expect people to move beautifully, and this "Dream" is almost balletic in concept. It's not just the aerial fairies and the rubbery Derrah, either: The four young lovers all boast beautiful body language, even if their Elizabethan articulations aren't always wonderful.
Most "Midsummer" productions have the supernatural forces transforming the humans from vanity toward maturity. Here it seems to be the humans who transform the demigods -- particularly Oberon, who moves from Strindbergian jealousy and misogyny to a sensual but tender lover by play's end.
And perhaps the deeper transformation for characters and audience alike is that no one leaves this production with a fear of flying.
("A Midsummer Night's Dream"; Play in five acts by William Shakespeare; At the Loeb Drama Center, through Feb. 28; 617-547-8300.)
Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com. 