A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
at Chicago Dramatists Workshop
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The wisdom of Oak Park Festival Theatre’s excellent production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (their third in 20 years) is to treat the supernatural turf battle between Titania and Oberon–but little else–seriously indeed. Here the fairies’ civil war touches everyone, in mistaken identities triggered by misapplied magic, but also in the benediction the placated fairies offer the closing marriages. Johnny Lee Davenport and Angela Iannone are magnificent and sensual consorts, providing a calm, earnest context for the frivolous events unleashed by their squabble. And in a brilliant touch, Colleen Kane plays Puck with sinister mischievousness, as if he were out of rhythm with everyone else. That choice is inspired: lacking a villain, this comedy has little other source of tension. Mingling Caliban’s churlishness and Ariel’s opportunism, Kane is a petulant watchdog, literally barking to celebrate Puck’s dangerous capacity to confuse.
From its first frenetic moment, this Equity Library Theatre Chicago production assumes that the script’s archaic jokes and tedious raillery mean it will fail on its own terms. And it’s true–this is a cartoon with complications. Like many before him, director Jack Hickey turns to groaner puns (“Dromio, Dromio, wherefore art thou Dromio?”), anachronisms (Road Runner-style chases), Stooges slaps, crotch kicks, fart jokes, freeze-frame tableaux, and caustic comments on the impenetrable text (confesses Dromio II after an obscure line, “I don’t know what it means either, folks”). Given the bad vaudeville, it seems unnecessary for one character to point into the distance and exclaim, “Look–there’s Shakespeare rolling in his grave!” It must be his favorite exercise.
