A Midsummer’s Night Dream
Reviewed by Martίn Hernández
Open Fist Theatre
Through Aug. 13
RECOMMENDED
William Shakespeare meets Margaret Mitchell in director James Fowler’s marvelous and thought-provoking take on this classic comedy. It is still set in Athens, but in Athens, Georgia of 1855, where the fairies and “mechanicals” are slaves, and the nobles their masters. In Fowler’s concept, much like the wily fairies are unseen to ancient Greece’s pompous royals, the South’s bondspeople are virtually invisible to their masters. Thus, the Black pixie class can covertly use their magic as retaliation against their brutal White masters.
Southern belle Hermia (Sandra Kate Burck), though promised to Demetrius (Devon Armstrong), loves Lysander (Dylan Wittrock), which enrages her gun-toting dad Egeus (Alexander Wells). Hermia’s BFF Helena (Ann Marie Wilding) has goo-goo eyes for Demetrius, but he constantly rejects her intense advances. Hermia and Lysander elope rather than have her face a death sentence from judge and plantation owner Theseus (Bryan Bertone). Helena snitches to Demetrius and he goes after the lovers, with Helena tagging along.
The Fairy Queen in the original, Titania (Ash Saunders), is now a wet nurse to a “changeling” child and Oberon (Phillip C. Curry), who wants the child to be his henchman, is here a shaman, rather than a Fairy King. Jealous of Titania’s hold on the child, Oberon has his minion Puck (an aptly nimble Monazia Smith) gather the makings of a love potion so that Titania will fall for an animal. Overhearing Helena expounding on her plight, Oberon orders Puck to give the potion to Demetrius in order to woo Helena. But when Puck mistakenly gives it to a sleeping Lysander – all Athenians look alike, right? – it is every man and woman for themselves.
The comic center balances on Nick Bottom (Michael A. Shepperd), a comic beast in more ways than one, aided by his fellow crafts workers (Malik S. Bailey, Syanne Green, Erica Mae McNeal, and Azeem Vecchio, who all ably double up as fairies), and the four dimwitted lovers and their shenanigans. Bottom is so vain he wants to play all the parts in a play that he and his cohorts are to present at the wedding of Theseus and the neighboring plantation scion Hippolyta (Heather Mitchell). And aided by Justin Eick’s slapstick fight choreography, the four paramours engage in a rip-roaring pas de quatre.
Despite all the frolic, Fowler reminds that us we are still in the Antebellum South – and by extension, the good old USA. The carpenter Peter Quince (Debba Rofheart), director of the “mechanicals’” play, is now portrayed as a British abolitionist, just bordering on the White savior trope. A racist slur blithely spat out – and from the Bard’s original text – even drew gasps.
At times we hear the snap of an offstage whip, and the slaves, knowing that any offense could lead to a similar fate, look to the ground when they are in the presence of their masters.
In Puck’s hand, though, it is that same lash that puts White folk to sleep, a metaphoric knockout punch. And it is under the guise of a character in a play that Bottom can angrily rebuke his master without any penalties.
From Bertone’s laconic drawl to Curry’s mellifluous diction to Saunders’s lilting country tones, the varied Southern accents of all the cast meld nicely with Shakespeare’s’ prose and poetry. And Fowler effectively uses Black church and street vibes to infuse his characters with colloquial depth. Choreographer Faith Knapp’s prologue, with the Black spiritual accompanying it, sets the appropriate tone with White and Black characters foreshadowing the power struggle to come. Jan Munroe’s set design, with a plantation parlor on one side, a slave shack on the other, and cotton plants upstage, is emblematic of the era’s racial power dynamics, while Gavan Wyrick’s lighting design, such as the deep blue mini lights draped all over the stage, augments the play’s dreamlike ambiance.
And lest we forget, that while we have been witnessing a comic fantasy, Fowler’s finale drives home the fact that a slave’s life was more nightmare than dream.
Open Fist Theatre Company at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave, Los Angeles. Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; through Aug. 13. Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, with one intermission www.openfist.org
