Summary 
Outstanding outdoor production enhanced with an actual impromptu live wedding onstage. Modernized to the Victorian era with wise contrast of moral rigidity with wild and at times animalistic woodland freedom. The four lovers literally deconstruct in the enchanted forest and the conclusion is enhanced with bursts of surprise fireworks. Everything works: fairy royalty, young lovers, rude mechanicals.
Design
Directed by Bruce Longworth. Set by Wes Peters. Costumes by Dottie Marshall. Lights by Laura Manteuffel. Music and sound by Rick Peeples.
Cast
Margo Buchanan (Titania), Danny Camiel (Puck), Robert Carin (Lysander), Robin Atkin Downes (Theseus), Al Espinosa (Oberon), Darrel Ford (Bottom), Callum Keith-King (Demetrius), Pamela Klarup (Hippolyta), David Kortemeier (Egeus), Jodi Marcs (Hermia), Philip Thompson (Quince), Pam Vogel (Helena).
Analysis
Moments before a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, a young couple is married impromptu on the Illinois Shakespeare Festival's outdoor stage at Ewing Manor. The brief ceremony enhances the romantic ambience of the ensuing production and is attended by almost the entire cast of the play, most in mid-costume and several in mid-makeup. The ceremony begins with two light-hearted songs from Illinois State University's Madrigal Singers, and the stage-lit wedding is given local television news coverage with still-photography by the Festival's General Manager. A member of the management staff and the company's Associate Artistic Director stand in as maid of honor and best man. In a charming final touch, the newlyweds, in true Renaissance tradition, jump hand-in-hand over Puck's broom to symbolize their commitment to hearth and home and are congratulated with warm applause.
Director Bruce Longworth's production uses a mottled green stage that is nearly bare except for a small jungle-gym apparatus consisting of metal ladders flanking a series of poles and high bars. The ladders and bars are employed by the woodland fairies, who jump to and swing from them, at times perching nimbly on the ladders to observe the actions of the mortals. Titania, for example, once enamored with Bottom, grips the high-bars and leans precariously out over the edge of the balcony to get a closer look at her beloved. The only other props consist of two lampposts on either side of the balcony and a small wading pool offstage left. Several dark green curtains represent dense foliage and are raised from the stage, draping the walls to depict the enchanted wood near Athens. Sound design contributes to this forest atmosphere with reverberating drumbeats and scattered animal noises. In addition, Titania's lithe fairies dance and leap kinetically about the set while making high-pitched chirping noises - much like crickets - and when Puck discovers the sleeping Lysander, his inquisitive owl-call amusingly becomes his cry of "who is this?"
The costume design contrasts the formally attired aristocracy with the ethereal yet earth-connected fairies: the ducal couple and four lovers are dressed in Victorian-style vested suits and brightly colored gowns, whereas the denizens of the wood are scantily clad in leaf-like garments and head-dresses of muted brown, green and yellow, and are smeared with dirt and grime. As a result of make-up and costuming, the usual doubling of Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania is not possible. There is also no correlation in the conflicts between the two couples in this production; the ensuing chaotic events are a result of the rift between the Fairy King and Queen, with the unaware Athenians depicted as insignificant. The Victorian setting, with its overtones of social inhibition and moral constriction, amplifies the disparity between the play's stolid nobility and the uninhibited freedom of emotion displayed by the fairies. For example, the four lovers, once they are physically lost in the forest and thematically detached from stringent Victorian social order, begin to deconstruct. With each successive scene, the lovers are depicted as more and more disposed to impassioned outbursts and they are stripped of their proper Victorian attire and reserve: the bespectacled Helena loses her entire dress and plays several scenes in her bloomers - her nose blackened with dirt - and when she loses her wire-rimmed glasses she staggers about comically in a near-sighted lurch; Demetrius, his ivory dress-shirt half untucked and with one suspender dangling loosely behind him, limps along with one shoe and is shown with a pants-leg rolled high, revealing a bruised knee; the disheveled Lysander loses his shirt, playing his scenes smeared with dirt in a soiled undershirt; and Hermia's lovely pink and white dress, replete with bows, loses one entire sleeve and then the next, and her dainty coiffure disintegrates, finally becoming entangled with briers. Hermia's devastation is complete when Demetrius, in enchanted defense of Helena, carries her bodily to the wading pool and dumps her bottom-first into the water.
The woodland fairies are ubiquitous, prowling in the wood and lurking about the Athenian court constantly, unobserved by the comparatively myopic mortals. During intermission the fairies sneak onstage to change props, chirping noisily enough to be heard and noticed by the audience before scurrying away. Of the mortals, only the emotionally enlightened Hippolyta has some cognitive sense of the fairy world, and she appears to hear - as if from a distance - the chirp of a nearby fairy in the play's opening scene, and visibly charmed, she playfully chirps back.
The agile Puck, displaying a signature leg-kick, watches the travails of the lovers with impish delight, and he shares a high-five with Oberon to celebrate their trickery of Titania. Puck appears to be as sensitive to the passion of love as the other fairies: he flirts playfully with a sprite in his first scene and shows scorn for the lack-love Demetrius. However, unlike Oberon, there is a malevolent aspect to Puck. Whereas Oberon playfully parodies the fairies' lullabye of Titania, whom he obviously adores but is temporarily at odds with, Puck's mockery of the abandoned Hermia seems cruel as he drives her from the stage in a sobbing frenzy. Further, while Oberon's anger at Titania is comically exaggerated (he practically spits her name every time he says it), Puck seems eager to injure, as he indicates when he is instructed by Oberon to remove the spell on Bottom and "take off this head": Puck's response is to raise his foot to stomp on Bottom's skull. Oberon restrains him, as he does throughout the production.
An already spirited show is energized by a blustering performance of bully Bottom. When Bottom notices his reflection in the wading pool on the side of the stage, he realizes his adventure with Titania was only a "dream," and his explosion of delight culminates in an gleeful romp through the pool that splashes the first row of the audience. Again, costume design enhances the character: Bottom is dreadfully dressed in baggy brown and red plaid pants, a striped long-sleeve shirt with red suspenders, heavy black work boots and a gaudy purple bowler. When abandoned by his panicked fellow actors after his "translation," Bottom's temperament varies wildly: he alternates from head-scratching bewilderment to stomping anger to lonely pouting to quaking fear. Bottom's bird-song is delivered in alternating low and high pitches that appropriately descend in its finale to a donkey's bray, and his interaction with the other colorfully clad mechanicals is a series of lively romps: to gather for rehearsal, the actors employ nasal duck calls in an unaware burlesque of the fairies' nature sounds, and they greet one another with an absurd secret handshake that consists of fingers wiggled over the head and loud whooping. Their court performance of is a delightful fiasco, with Bottom losing his rubber sword with each overblown entrance and the players ravaging the dialogue, clumsily forcing "whisper" to rhyme with "sinister" and "blood" with "good." During the course of the performance, the stiffly nervous Wall apparently experiences severe intestinal distress and clutches himself both front and back. The resulting "chinks" in the wall that Pyramus and Thisby must speak through are therefore placed in compromising positions on "Wall," and Bottom's and Flute's reluctance to continue draws the biggest laughs of the production, followed closely by the noticeably relieved Wall's comment on having "discharged" his role. Afterwards, Theseus halts the hempen homespuns - much like Oberon restrains Puck - just as they break into an energetic, hip-thrusting Bergomask dance.
Athens' ensuing romantic calm remains tenuous, however, as Puck makes clear after his somber final words, spoken softly while alone on the darkened stage. With a wicked grin, Puck blows a shrill whistle and a barrage of fireworks bursts into the sky from behind the stage. The stage-lights flash as the entire cast swarms the stage, whooping and hollering, and charges exuberantly up into the audience to give away hands-full of candy. In an appropriately matrimonial moment, the newlywed couple, seated in the audience, is brought down to the stage for more photographs, this time with the entire cast in full costume and the stage brilliantly lit.
Note: A version of this article was edited and published in Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol.12, No.2, Spring 1994.