Aug 10, 2007

Audience takes 'Midsummer' romp in woods

By John Angell Grant / Theater Reviewer

For six years Theater in the Woods (now called AtmosTheatre) has produced outdoor summer shows on the Peninsula, deep in a forest in Woodside.

This year's offering is an entertaining production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," William Shakespeare's fabulous comedy about exploding sex hormones out of control. As it turns out, exploding sex hormones make human beings both elated and miserable.

Watching the comedy outdoors in a secluded redwood forest in Woodside is pretty cool. Here, Theater in the Woods has staged its slapstick production in which the audience hikes from site to site, to follow scenes of the play through several different locations.

In "A Midsummer Night's Dream," four young friends become bickering rivals in an endlessly changing love quadrangle. Each pursues someone who doesn't want him or her romantically.

When forest fairy prankster Puck puts love juice in the eyes of various participants, the entire chemistry of the love quadrangle suddenly shifts to a new set of love preferences.
Chaos and resentment ensue. All four lovers end up rolling around in the dirt and fighting.

In director Stuart Bousel's production, the setting has been updated from ancient Athens to somewhere in 19th-century Europe. Theater in the Woods has shortened Shakespeare's script to accommodate the production's hiking time, and still bring the show in under three hours.

This production is interactive, in the sense that when the tour guide rings a little bell, the audience gets up and moves to the next location. In one early scene, the audience stands on a trail caught in the middle of a feud between rival fairy bands.

The king and queen of the fairies themselves are longtime feuding lovers. On one side of the trail the queen's fairies emerge; on the other sits the king's henchman Puck, eating an apple. In between them the audience members stroll.

Between such scenes, the walks from location to location have a dramatic value in their own right, allowing audience members a chance to process the jealous conflicts that they have just witnessed. The production would have benefited from even more of these location changes, rather than settling into one spot after a while.

Victor Carrion turns in the best comic performance of the show as self-absorbed amateur actor Nick Bottom, trying to hog for himself all the parts in a foolish play-within-the-play. Carrion is a performer with striking presence and charisma.

Several of the actors groped for their lines early during the opening day performance, but soon righted themselves.

Costume designer Gregorio De Masi's 19th-century aristocratic costumes offer an effective contrast with the surrounding wilderness.

Likewise, set designer Karen Offerein's few pieces of formal tea party furniture placed in front of white, gauzy curtains on a small stage give the production distinctive contrasts with the natural environment.

Amy Manley's lovely pastoral flute playing provides appropriate musical interludes between scenes.

"Midsummer's" changing love chemistry reminds us how foolish human, hormone-driven passion can be. "Reason and love keep little company together," observes Nick Bottom during one lucid moment.

In making a farewell at the end of the play, fairy prankster Puck turns to the audience with impish intent and asks us to consider this: For those who've been in love, is the memory of your romance just a dream, or did it really happen?

Rating: Three stars