A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Reviewed by Gray Palmer
Independent Shakespeare Company
Through November 20

RECOMMENDED

The mad events of A Midsummer Night’s Dream begin with a legal brief against love and a summary judgment by authority not simply against defiant Hermia (April Fritz), but against the freedom of female sexuality. The gendered social nightmare and the power of the state both join to sentence Hermia to actual or social death. Egeus (Faqir Hassan) is a father who chooses death for his daughter when she refuses to consent to his “disposition of property.” She must marry his choice for her, Demetrius (Erwin Tuazon), kill herself, or become a monastic celibate. But she loves Lysander (Evan Lewis Smith). A time limit is placed on reflection before she is expected to give her decision: Father and the state require her to answer when the early moon appears at the nuptials of war-like Theseus (Jose Acain) and Hippolyta (Martha T. Newman). We’re under a moon-clock.

(Then Shakespeare’s astronomy goes weird. It’s as though the possibility of sublunary female freedom has mixed up the almanac. The first lines of the play establish that there are four days till the new moon, or that after four days, we’ll see the early moon’s tiny silver bow (that’s different). Seeing that the duke’s marriage and a possible death sentence are both expected at the appearance of this early moon — preceded by nights of darkness — it’s odd that the play then mixes up lunar phases, and we watch events unfold in silvery light. But never mind orbital law, we’re on a “silver planet” now.)

For Hermia and Lysander, the sensible answer to their problem is to run like hell, and they do. They run into the forest outside Athens, into the madness of the Dream, into director David Melville’s dark, sexy and very funny production, staged in the intimate ISC Studio Space, with a trimmed-down company (almost all the actors play two roles), where we quickly find true madness at the entrance of Puck (the beautifully crazy Jose Acain), the most demented Puck I’ve ever seen.

You probably know the drill: Helena (Tatania Louder) loves Demetrius, Demetrius loves Hermia, Hermia loves Lysander. Helena runs after Demetrius, Demetrius runs after Hermia. Later Lysander runs after Helena, as succinctly put by critic Jan Kott.

Everyone is sent to a cranked-up domain of love sentiment against a black velvet psyche. Linguistic baubles are snagged on some very strange barbed-wire sculpture — and for a while everything turns to venereal meanness. But eventually it’s a hat-trick: three weddings plus a reconciliation of quarreling fairies. (And let’s not think too much about what happened that night.)

In the meantime, we’re translated to a granular but more powerful scale. The quarrel between royal fairies Oberon (Sam Breen) and Titania (who else but Kalean Ung?) is introduced like a battle between miniature Dr. Who villains. And proving once again that Shakespeare is our contemporary, Melville at one point has Oberon try to bite an iPhone before dropping it in a bucket of water.

But also in the meantime, adding to the chaos, enter the mechanicals for a rehearsal of a “tedious brief scene” out of Ovid, “Pyramus and Thisby,” commissioned as an entertainment for the duke’s wedding. Director Melville and company here send up themselves as a fractious, somewhat democratic company of actors (performers will recognize every bit of the temperamental business). And by this point in Dream, audiences will have seen all the doubling of characters in the ISC cast — and just how good the entire company is.

Points of particular admiration: The lullaby Melville has composed for “You spotted snakes with double tongue,” a very sleepy ear-worm (pedaling on G minor), briefly resembles Satie’s Gnossienne #1 in scale and hypnotic line (on “Beetles black approach not near”) — staged with a chorus of hairy puppets on sticks.

The contagious fog exhaled by the earth actually appears onstage. It’s fairy-genic, but when I heard the text at this performance I swear it sounded like an early-modern prophecy of capital-o-genic climate change.

The line, “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” passes the kitsch test with a check. Yes, that’s kitsch. But ho. When Titania says it, she’s drunk and doesn’t know it. Puck has slipped her an Elizabethan roofie, ingested through her eyes. So that she will give herself to a beast while Oberon watches. What a dirty play! (Melville says he has a G-rated version for school groups.)

Not, I hope, to make odious comparisons, but Tatania Louder is a revelation as Helena. Faqir Hassan’s movie-star acting as Bottom is a scream. Oh, and as for screams, Kalean Ung provides a false-exit special-effect scream that stops the show.

ISC, carry on.

ISC at Independent Studio, 3191 Casitas Ave., #168, Atwater Village; Thurs.-Sat., 7:30 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through November 20. (818) 710-6306, iscla.org. Running time: two hours and 30 minutes with intermission.