Girl fight!

It's too bad girls don't like each other much in Shakespeare. It would be nice if our clever bard had left a few more words of wisdom for his female followers that weren't about feuding sisters abandoning senile fathers to the elements, or ladies threatening to dash babies' brains out.

Maybe it was the Secret Theatre's staging of The Taming of the Shrew that got me thinking about Shakespeare's gals. Their fun interpretation put a Mormon spin on the famous morality play, casting Petruccio in a particularly sinister light as a Warren Jeffs look-alike played by Richard McDonald. Kate mercilessly led her sister Bianca onstage by a rope, and clawed at her father for his indifference. (Brief aside: the hair design was a stroke of sublime genius).

In the many Midsummer Night's Dreams we've seen lately Helena and Hermia are always directed to communicate midsummer in jealous high-pitched shrieks. Last night's production in Central Park was no exception. The Gorilla Rep's disappointing romp in the park in conjunction with an all-Norwegian cast of actors was no Smiles of a Summer Night. Actors sped so fast through their lines while galumphing around on the grass that I was glad I knew what the play was about, since it was impossible to get much sense of it from their deliveries.

Midsummer Night's Dream: "Thou Art Translated"

If the Henry history plays were the most popular during Shakespeare's time, what does it meant that, in New York, Midsummer Night's Dream far outstrips the bard's other plays in sheer number of productions? Did the financial crash make us dash headlong into the Edenic Athenian woods because all mistakes are fixable and the benevolence of Puck and Oberon's white magic is the order of the day? Or is it the Shakespearean Sex in the City and have our appetites for sensuality and love become so universal that troupes are afraid of putting on anything else? Certainly, it's a great play. But with two more on the roster just for the month of June, it strikes me there has to be a reason for its contemporary popularity.

Mortal Folly Theatre's version directed by Katherine Harte-DeCoux was certainly my favorite of the two. Firecat's abridged production made some curious choices (like having the actors speak all their lines to the horizon and not to one another) but I'm afraid their body paint and jazz shoes seemed to be less tongue-in-cheek than earnest high-school pantomime, though I think David may disagree with this. Check out the cast shot http://firecatnyc.com/Cast.html.

Mortal Folly's production ("What fools these mortals be" proclaims Puck) was wonderful in the forest. The actors really enjoyed playing, they had a great one-woman orchestra who seamlessly combined cello and kazoo, and they included an adorable child to represent Hippolyta's "stolen" Indian boy, who was entirely left out of the other versions we've seen. The "changeling boy's" presence added an innocent touch to the Rubenesque sensuality of the feathery, ferny, fleshy forest, showing how the theater can be just as bewitching for its actors as for its audience.

"Both right and sinister"

The idea of casting Zephyer Rep's "Midsummer Night's Dream" with an all-female cast seems an appropriate way to update a play once acted entirely by men. Such a transformation has the promise of undermining the play's heterosexual underpinnings, which are pretty solid despite its brief flirtation with bestiality. Kymm Zuckert (Bottom) and Caroline Kessler (Lysander) amp up this production's queer innuendos by sporting black leather and chains, but despite the potential offered in the play's dialog--"I am a man as other men are"--the play reinforced gender roles rather than calling them much into question. Lysander repeatedly grabbed and pointed to "his" crotch, and Helena and Hermia engaged in such a screeching "girl fight" that it was virtually impossible to understand a word of what was said. This production made clear that it is not enough to have a clever concept for re-envisioning Shakespeare--the words too must be interpreted so that the conceit is more than merely superficial. Why set the play in the 80s for instance?

More Midsummer in Midspring

In our enthusiasm for the Blessed Unrest production of Midsummer Night's Dream, we forgot I think to talk about the actual play.

Midsummer Night's Dream is often performed and its plot convoluted, so, in brief, it is the story of two couples' courting complications after they wander into the fairy woods and run across impish supernaturals there.

"The course of true love never did run smooth," Lysander says to Hermia after her father forbids their wedding, and indeed, although the play is often dismissed as light romp (probably written for a marriage ceremony) it seems to me to say something profound about the nature of human love. "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind," says Helena, but according to the play, love is neither. Once Puck places the love-in-idleness flower on Lysander, his affection for Hermia, an affection that previously they were both willing to die for, is re-directed.

Is the point here that someone all love, or all human feeling, is mysterious or even arbitrary? Helena has a serious of tricks to woo Demetrius, including revealing her friends' elopement plans, but not until he too is struck by the flower does he come around.

Thoughts?

Blessed Unrest

Agreed.

This Midsummer Night's Dream was perhaps the most delightful play we have seen so far. We had seen so many stinkers as we crawled out to the odd corners of Manhattan for this project, and Blessed Unrest's promise of "theater for the adventurous" and invitation to come over for drinks made me worry they were going to try and get us liquored up before a performance of the play in pig latin or with sock puppets.

Instead, this was a tight, well-acted, and fun production, right down to a choreographer Lady Gaga dance at the end of the first act. Vaishnavi Sharma and especially Hannah Wilson are terrific. Even the space, which looked like a scrubbed down Soho loft circa 1975, including the coughing pipes, was a vast improvement over the other church basements we've crept into

We've got a full-deck of Shakespeare in the days and weeks to come. I dare say I'd see this one again.

"Your play needs no excuse"

Thank god for "Blessed Unrest's" production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." This diamond in the rough restored my faith in off-off Broadway, a faith that wavered rather seriously since we began our project. This company's energetic and crystal-clear presentation of a play packed with fairies, amazon queens, magic elixirs, and shape-changing donkeys made Shakespeare's magical forest thoroughly relevant and captivating from start to finish. Opening with a provocatively naked Hippolyta, the actors deftly navigated the themes of infidelities and inconstancy, while amping up polyamorous innuendos in campy costumes that came off bit by bit as the play went on. There was a surprising and wonderful dance sequence at the end of the first half, and even the silly play within the play was performed so well that the audience guffawed despite the hour. A production like this makes me glad that as we check the upcoming Shakespeare performances in New York, we continue to say, along with Theseus, "I will hear that play." Everyone should.