Theatre in Review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Pearl Theatre Company/Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival)

	Sean McNall, Mark Bedard, Joey Parsons, Nance Willamson, Jason O'Connell. Photo: Russ Rowland

Welcome to the age of Downsized Shakespeare. The idea is afoot these days, in many of the better theatres, that you don't need all that pageantry and all those extras to do one of the Bard's works; half a dozen actors will do nicely, thank you, with everyone double- or triple-cast in various roles. This approach can be attributed to the influence of Fiasco Theatre, which has had great success with vest-pocket productions of Cymbeline and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, both of which got by with casts of six -- an idea taken up by New York Shakespeare Festival last summer with its own Cymbeline, a veritable extravaganza in comparison, with a company of nine. (We will draw a veil over Alan Cumming's solo Macbeth; I wish he had.) Personally, I think the idea started to take hold as early as 2002, when Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the Globe Theatre of London's Cymbeline, with Mark Rylance leading a company of six. It's interesting how fond all these companies are of Cymbeline; I guess that if you're going to do that bizarre play at all, it pays to economize.

Now comes the Pearl's attack on A Midsummer Night's Dream, in a co-production with Cold Spring-based Hudson Valley Shakespeare. The play is a likely choice for a slimmed-down approach; although the list of characters is lengthy, most of the scenes focus on groups of four or five -- and one of the real successes of Eric Tucker's production comes in the final sequence, when the cast deftly shifts between playing the rude mechanicals, giving their shambolic presentation of "Pyramus and Thisbe," and their audience of appalled Athenian aristocrats. In order to maintain a sense of clarity and purpose, however, this sort of production needs to be executed with tremendous precision and discipline. Sadly, Tucker and company subordinate the text, indulging in a marathon of gags and gimmicks. Funny voices, weird dialects, interpolated lines, rough-and-tumble physical action, and crude sexual/anatomical references -- there's enough cute, self-referential shtick for half a dozen revivals of Godspell.

The action begins on a sly, amusing note with a voiceover announcement welcoming us to Pearl Theatre Company's production of Uncle Vanya, but the red flags start flying as soon as the company enters and delivers the opening exchange between Theseus, Duke of Athens, and the captured Amazon Queen Hippolyta in different combinations and styles; in one of them, Hippolyta sounds like an ape.

Well, we're on notice that the actors are going to have fun all night - and we're on our own. Egeus, father of Hermia, one of the play's embattled lovers, delivers a speech in which he puts verbal quotation marks around the words "nosegay" and "sweetmeats," as if they were hilarious to hear. Demetrius, who wants to marry the uninterested young Hermia, is played by that normally fine actor Sean McNall with an accent that exists on a continuum somewhere between Antonio Banderas and Bela Lugosi. When Bottom, the weaver, auditions for "Pyramus and Thisbe," he reads his lines like female porn star. Snug, the joiner, is played by two actors, seemingly joined at the head, delivering the dialogue in unison. At one point, worried about the weather, the entire cast rushes to the edge of the stage, begging for someone in the audience to produce an almanac.

And so it goes: When Hermia, caught up in the plot's permutations, exclaims, "I am amazed, and know not what to say," the rest of the company shouts, "Waah-waah," evoking the mocking trumpet sound of a million film and television comedies. Bottom, having been turned into a donkey, shares a tender moment with Titania; they are joined by Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, and the others in what can only be termed a fairyland gang bang. (When all else fails, Tucker mashes the actors together in tableaux that look like they were staged with a Twister board.) In "Pyramus and Thisbe," the lovers are separated by a Wall, played by an actor; typically, they speak through a "crack" in the wall, signified by two spread fingers; in this production, they have to communicate through the Wall actor's crotch. You can imagine what this does to Thisbe's line, "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all."

None of this does anything for the cause of clarity. My colleague Peter Filichia has rightly commented that if you are unfamiliar with A Midsummer Night's Dream, this production will, at best, leave you bewildered. And even if you are entranced by this gag-a-minute approach, is there any reason why the references have to be so tired and secondhand? When Hermia is given time to answer an important question, everyone else launches into the theme from the game show Jeopardy! When the rude mechanicals get together, they hum "The Girl From Ipanema." Bottom, trying to prove his serious actor credentials, plays Pyramus à la Marlon Brando in his Stanley Kowalski phase. Also quoted are the themes from Psycho and The Godfather. Oh, and yes, at the conclusion of "Pyramus and Thisbe," the tragic heroine leans over the body of her beloved and takes a selfie; this is what passes as a fresh idea on stage at the Pearl right now.

It's possible to be completely bored by all this running around and yet admire the cast for the flexibility and high spirits with which everyone goes about executing each new task. Mark Bedard's best moments are as Flute, who really gets into the role of Thisbe, flouncing around the stage and trilling his lines in an unnaturally high voice. McNall brings some authority to the role of Theseus and also conveys a sense of having great fun. Jason O'Connell, as Puck and Bottom, dominates the production; the one real, unforced moment comes when Bottom awakes, confused and unclear if the adventure he recalls was real or a dream. Joey Parsons has a few amusing moments of outraged virtue as Hermia, and Nance Williamson gets a few laughs during some of Helen's more aggrieved moments.

John McDermott's set consists of a deck outlined in Day-Glo tape and filled with what looks like cat litter; it's a sandbox for the actors to play in. The rest of the space is stripped of masking, laying bare the wings and upstage areas. Eric Southern's lighting includes some effective uplight looks for the forest at night and clever color-change cues for those moments when characters awaken, falling instantly in love with the first visible face. The exposed theatricality of McDermott's design leaves the overhead LED battens in clear audience view, however, and, in their extreme brightness, they sometimes constitute an irritating distraction. Jessica Wegener Shay's costumes consist of modified tracksuits and gym wear, suitable for a play loaded with physical bits of business. Mikhail Fiksel's sound design includes all the musical cues mentioned above and more.

There's nothing wrong with this production that a massive directorial blue pencil couldn't fix. Watching it, it's easy to assume that everyone in the rehearsal was so delighted by their communal antics that they couldn't bear to cut a thing. The result is silly, tedious, self-indulgent -- a college show put on by people well past their baccalaureate days. It's an insult to rude mechanicals everywhere. -- David Barbour