 "Photo: Courtesy of Mark Rutkowski")
Near the end of UT’s Department of Theatre and Dance’s new production of William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one event encapsulates the play’s fanciful ethos. An amateur troupe of actors stages a sentimental tragedy for an audience of lovers whose travails have just taken up the traffic of the previous two hours. The short piece is inconsequential, but the manner in which it is staged, with a sense of silly self-awareness and lack of irony, exemplifies the production’s commitment to organic, handmade and mythical theater.
This mythmaking should be credited to the production’s stellar direction. Apart from a few missteps (fairies flying on wires comes to mind), Paul Mullin’s simultaneously measured and loose staging of the 400-year-old play perfectly translates the magnificent language of the bard for a contemporary audience. The actors, who are entrusted with that bejeweled verse, also rise to the challenge and collectively deliver a truly impassioned rendering of the text. Most important, though, is the beauty of the staging. While not a minimalist production, the wondrous world is created not by sets or costumes but by the energy and ingenuity of the stage work of actors who have fully melded the text to its theatrical function — namely to make people laugh.
And what laughs there are. The play concerns a quartet of lovers, two girls (Helena and Hermia) and two boys (Demetrius and Lysander). Helena, the geek of the group, is desperately in love with Demetrius, who is devoted to Hermia, whose affections lie with Lysander. Amid this tangle of unrequited love, parents who just don’t understand threaten to force marriage between Hermia and Demetrius, so the four run away one night into the woods and find themselves in the pastoral world of the fairies, who are ruled by Oberon and his strong-willed wife, Titania. As you may have guessed, complications, in the form of love potions and mistaken identities, arise, and the whirligig of love continues on its “unsmooth course” toward a happy and fair conclusion.
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is consistently ranked among the Bard’s most popular plays, and the reason lies perhaps in the play’s wanton theatricality. It asks theatergoers to dream of a fantastical realm and to believe in such things as instantaneous love and the purity of the natural world. Finally, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” releases that long-buried sense of wonder and faith in impossible things long lost in childhood. It harkens back to the days when nothing but the rude mechanics of imagination and convenient props were enough to create epics. It would behoove anyone with a love of theater — nay, with a love of love — to spend an early winter’s evening with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
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