Love in idleness

Huntington's Dream is beautiful but bland

by Carolyn Clay

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, By William Shakespeare. Directed by Mary Zimmerman. Set design by Scott Bradley. Costumes by Mara Blumenfeld. Lighting by Scott Zielinski. Sound and original music by Michael Bodeen. With John Wojda, Francesca Faridany, Christopher Donahue, Meredith Zinner, Kevin Daniels, Michael Medico, Sarah Rafferty, Larry Paulsen, Ed Dixon, Jesse Weaver, Paul Kerry, Robert Saoud, Everett O'Neil, Doug Hara, and Kirstin Showalter Hara. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Boston University Theatre through January 31.

All the stage's a world in the Huntington Theatre Company's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is certainly one of the most beauteous of bare-bones stagings. The playing area is open to its brick walls. The setting is a theater -- according to director Mary Zimmerman, "the one place in the world where the enchanted and the material world coexist," as they do in Shakespeare's comedy of spatting fairies and mortals bewitched. Before this drab backstage milieu, set designer Scott Bradley strews his lush, spare "visions": a formal row of gaunt, tall arches to represent the rational, daylight world of Athens; a billowing green drop on which watery and forestial images ripple, indicating the "dream" world of the Athenian wood; plexiglass boxes filled with verdant bits and pieces; a giant fluorescence-girdled moon; and a framed, flower-laden bower for Titania that's straight out of a Romantic painting.

"Think . . . /That you have but slumbered here/While these visions did appear," says Puck at the end, indicating the retreating pieces of scenery and a few departing actors as he wiggles into street clothes and pops off his Yoda ears. Thus are all of us enfolded, like the play's marveling lovers and rustics, into the question: what of this was real? Or, since clearly none of it was real, what of it was genuine? As Zimmerman puts it, "Is the enchanted world of the forest the dream world, or is it the real world? Are we really ourselves when we're in that heightened state of consciousness, or are we really ourselves when we're not?" Is Theseus the temperate but imagination-spurning lauder of "cool reason," or is he Oberon, tenderly manipulating the denizens of the dream? Is there such a thing as true love, or is coupling so arbitrary it can be ordained by nectar and mischief?

Both the conception and the design of this Midsummer are so captivating that one wishes the acting were more uniformly inspired and that the momentum were stronger. For such a stripped-down, anti-illusory staging to work, the play's enchantment must be supplied by the performers. The Huntington company is certainly competent: the bare-chested, goat-legged Puck of Doug Hara is an intriguing combination of Pan and punk, and there are memorable turns by Ed Dixon as a low-rent Old Vic Bottom and Sarah Rafferty as a Paula Prentissy Helena. Moreover, Zimmerman is a director of certified smarts -- she's a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (often dubbed the "genius grant"). But here she appears to have done more thinking about what Midsummer means than about how to put it across. In the end, she counts on Shakespeare, laid out straight, to sprinkle the fairy dust.

The production is arresting to look at, with Bradley's floating set pieces and lighting designer Scott Zielinski's harsh white beams in marked contrast to Mara Blumenfeld's lavish costumes, the regal blacks and silvers of court dress giving way to shocking reds and blues as the lovers come undone in the woods. Still, there are some inconsistencies: Francesca Faridany's Titania is as ravishingly Pre-Raphaelite as her bower, but her train of winged fairies -- mostly children -- are almost goofily turned out, in tutus, bright tights, and diddly-boppers. Michael Bodeen's original music is as richly textured as the costumes.

Among the performers, the physically adroit Hara (whose last Huntington outing was as the athletic Monkey of Zimmerman's Journey to the West) is the most interesting -- a convincing combination of elf and animal. And the moment when his Puck suddenly leaps up onto the shoulders of John Wojda's tall Oberon is gorgeous. But Hara tosses off his speeches; there's no poetry in him. Wojda best handles the verse and makes a stately if lackluster Oberon/Theseus. Faridany, so delightful in the Huntington's The Game of Love and Chance, is here a Titania less lyrical than vexed. Among the lovers, Rafferty's Helena is awfully contemporary but full of dizzy spunk, whereas Meredith Zinner's Hermia is a spitfire whose relentless cuteness had me rooting for Helena in the cat fight. The Demetrius of Kevin Daniels and Lysander of Michael Medico are just bland.

As a plummy Bottom, Dixon is laughable yet dignified -- a veritable Gielgud among the mechanicals. And there are poignantly funny turns by Larry Paulsen as rube-impresario Quince and Robert Saoud as a dazedly stagestruck Snout. The interplay among the on-stage audience members (in a row of theater seats) and performers during the act-five play within the play is clever, with Jesse Weaver, as Flute, providing the highlight of "The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby": the heroine's outlandish suicide by sword-through-the-head.

In the end, though, this carefully considered but insufficiently propelled production is part Dream, part snooze. I've seen some memorable productions of Shakespeare's comedy, among them Alvin Epstein's, which incorporated Purcell's music for The Faerie Queen, and Peter Brook's, which framed the acrobatic action in a gleaming white box. This one's heady -- but without the "seething brains" and "shaping fantasies" Theseus attributes to those exemplars of imagination, the lunatic, the lover, and the poet.