If you’ve ever wondered why Shakespeare didn’t include more shadow puppetry or games of Stella Ella Ola in his work, then this is the show for you. The Trinity College Dramatic Society’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lives up to the play’s title: just as in a dream, the audience is presented with a series of fantastic, incoherent scenes that blur into one another.
The play takes a “choose your own adventure” format, where it is up to the audience to choose which plot thread to follow. The action takes place all over the Trinity College campus, with at least two scenes playing at any given moment. The result is something of a logistical nightmare. Traffic jams are better directed than some scenes of this play.
Despite this flaw, the quality of the acting alone makes it well worth your time. The play’s iconic characters — Titania, Puck, Bottom, and assorted fairies — are brought to life by hilarious, brilliantly-acted performances.
At its best — like when the audience is invited to sing along to Mendelssohn’s famous “Wedding March” — the production is highly engaging. It’s silly; it’s cute; it’s fun. The audience is allowed to participate in a well-known, well-loved piece of art. At its worst, it’s confusing and incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the play.
A great deal of work clearly went into this production, which, despite its confusing setup, comes across with remarkable artistic finish. The cast, however, succeeds only in breathing life into a lifeless concept. The novelty of the premise never evolves beyond that: a novelty — a quirky setup that, while interesting, never fully captures the depth inherent in even this, the most frivolous of Shakespeare’s comedies. “What fools these mortals be,” Puck famously comments. This production focuses more on the mortals’ foolery than the actual meaning of Puck’s statement, the insight into human nature for which Shakespeare is renowned.
