A Midsummer Night's Dream
playwright William Shakespeare
company Pearl Theater
theater Pearl Theater
players
Mark Bedard, Sean McNall, Jason O’Connell, Joey Parsons, & Nance Williamson
director Eric Tucker
choreography Birgitta Victorson
set John McDermott
costumes Jessica Wegener Shay
lights Eric Southern
sound Mikail Fiskel
An exhilarating Midsummer at the Pearl reduces the show to five players, a bare stage, and no props. Yet it may be the most visually stunning production I’ve ever seen. Throughout the show, the actors mutate and contort themselves to create strange stage images and impressive CGI-like metamorphoses. The show opens with a performer aping a gorilla. Then Duke Theseus and his train arrive to hunt, bate, and shoot the beast. This is Midsummer influenced by Lynch and Cronenberg, and its fairies are the stuff of Guillermo del Toro’s nightmares.
The
no-prop, all-physical style frees Jason O'Connell from the masks and prosthetics
that obscure most Bottoms. O’Connell plays the part as an everyman who’s
vaguely aware of and disturbed by his transformation into a monster. Opposite
him, Joey Parsons makes Titania an impressively uncanny presence, moving her
arms in slow ripples to suggest the billowing of her gown as her Titania floats
regally in the air. Her sexual conquest of Bottom has an element of rape to it,
with her fairies dragging him into an S/M scenario with no safe-word. In this Midsummer, the love-flower is a thorny trident
that gets stabbed into the victim’s eyes.
Eric
Tucker, the director, has already established himself as an inventive interpreter of
Shak with Bedlam Theater and with Women
of Will, a two-actor feminist perspective on Shak’s career. He reaches a
new level with Midsummer
by finding a stage correlative for the alchemy of Shak’s poetry. His performers
alter their bodies in the same way that metaphor transforms an image.
Throughout the play Puck describes his power of transformation, and it’s the
core of O’Connell’s performance. His Puck is mercurial as the Genie in Aladdin, taking regular form as a buzz-winged
demonoid.
The
human characters swat at this hornet-like fairy, who from their POV is insect-sized.
This trick of perspective is a signature of Tucker’s; in Midsummer he also fractures time, moving back and forth in the play
at strange moments. He repeats Puck’s claims of mutability, once as a soliloquy
at intermission and then backwards at the return (like a satanic record). Tucker
also revisits Bottom’s transformation from different POVs over the show’s three
hours.
These
two moments are the foundation of Tucker’s radical Midsummer. But what makes the Pearl’s staging (co-produced with the
Hudson Valley Shak Festival) a work of genius is that it doesn’t sacrifice the
play’s delights to its dark vision. The lovers are still full of delightful
follies, and the clowns are as bumptious as ever. O’Connell may stand out as
Tucker’s onstage surrogate, but all five actors cohere as an ensemble and have
stand-out moments. The staging is protean and manic, but its action is always
clear as day and at the service of Shak’s tale.
Tucker’s
Bedlam is one of two New York companies who are rising to the challenge that Shak’s
endless linguistic invention poses (the other is the Fiasco Theater). Both
companies slim the cast size and double- and triple-cast actors, ignoring
gender and type. They relax the realistic impulse that lies under most productions.
By following the playwright’s lead—those plots, that verse, all the
plays-within-plays—they prove (if any proof was needed) that Shak is great
material for experimental theater. It’s too soon to call them the vanguard of a
movement. But between this Midsummer
and Fiasco’s Two Gents last
spring, NYC in 2015 is the scene of superb, forward-looking Shakespeare.
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The Pearl Theater's Midsummer Night's Dream runs from Sep 8 to Nov 1 at 555 W. 42nd Street.
photos Russ Rowland
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