Midsummer Night's Dream

The American Shakespeare Festival company is presenting a quite forgettable production.

Consulting my program, I am reminded that they claim it to be A Midsummer Night's Dream, but this surely is a typographical error, for that play is funny, beautiful, and splendidly poetic, while this production is only occasionally amusing, infrequently beautiful, and rarely poetic. It suffers from a Special Guest Star, Bert Lahr, who is billed above the title, and in larger type. The Stratford company has often before hurt itself with guests, the most notable case being the deplorable Miss Hepburn, apparently because they believe that good Shakespeare, well-acted, cannot attract audiences in this country without a name-star. (This is a demonstrably false proposition--Joseph Papp's New York productions refute it every summer.)

It is sad, though, to see Lahr flop, because he has been and still is a very funny man. But with Shakespeare, Lahr faces a special difficulty: he is unable to create an image of himself different from the one he has built up over the years, and the usually funny personage doesn't fit into the play Shakespeare wrote. Lahr overacts, as does almost everyone in this production. His most irritating mannerism was an overuse of the forefinger. He brandished it and he gesticulated with it, to no purpose or effect. He was sometimes funny in the final scenes, when the offending digit was subtracted (perhaps out of fear that his colleague, Lion, would snap it off).

Most of the other actors are similarly inadequate. Mitchell Agruss, as Theseus, handles some of Shakespeare's most exquisite poetry as if it were prose; Rae Allen (Hippolyta) cannot shape a long speech so as to maintain any interest at all; three of the four young Athenians are incompetently portrayed, with only Mariette Hartley, as Helena, rising above mediocrity. Titania, Oberon, and most of their minions were neither human nor supernatural, and failed completely to blend the two in the way that the play requires. Some child-fairies, costumed in what appeared to be their pajamas, were revolting.

One performance would have looked good in any production, and seemed splendid in this one: Clayton Corzatte's Puck. Corzatte was nimble of foot and voice, moving always with grace and speaking with great clarity and in bell-like tones that become extraordinary during incantations. Perhaps the only fault in his performance was an occasional tendency to speak too rapidly, and even this can be excused as an attempt to get the wretched evening over with.

The set, by David Hays and Peter Wexler, was simple and flexible; Will Steven Armstrong lit it subtly and usefully. (I say subtly for I did not realize how good the lighting was until I thought about it after the performance--which is as it should be.) Marc Blitzstein's music may be good, but the reproduction was so inadequate and tinny that one can only guess. Among other aims attributable to the director, Jack Landau, is the addition of non-Shakespearean material, for the sake of an unfunny vaudeville bit.

I should record that most of those present found this production side-splittingly hilarious. Their affection for Lahr is shared by me, but I would rather have spent the evening at The Wizard of Oz.