Cal Shakes’ playful look at love and lust
Knotty syntax untangled in modernized ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’
The fairies of Tyne Rafaeli’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” are no woodland sprites with pointy ears and jagged Peter Pan hemlines. They sport ballooning bulges of bouffon and black-light-ready neon, by costume designer Ásta Bennie Hostetter. They undulate their bellies, jiggle their protuberances and make weird little pelvic thrusts to sound design, by T. Carlis Roberts, that evokes a UFO takeoff. When they speak, it’s either like a poetry slam or in the nasal, blitzedout inflection of the aliens from “Toy Story.”
If these fairies make playgrounds of the mortal world and their own love lives, Cal Shakes’ production, seen Tuesday, May 28, takes a similar approach to the 1596 comedy, one in which Shakespeare is always playing, too. He offers refraction upon refraction of what love and lust look like, each new strand of subplot magnifying the silliness and spectacle of the last.
In ancient Athens and a parallel fairy world, there’s a flower called love-inidleness whose nectar, spread on the eyes of the sleeping, “will make or man or woman madly dote upon the next live creature that it sees.” But that love juice is no otherworldly force; it’s a natural extension of how we actually feel and behave. We really do froth over with desire, our bodies wrecked and ravaged vehicles for impulses beyond our control. Yet we also really do redirect that desire toward new objects on whims, half-whims, changes in the wind’s direction.
In Rafaeli’s production, that dynamic, where everything is flammable and sparks are everywhere, perhaps reaches its apogee when Athenians Lysander (Dean Linnard) and Demetrius (Kevin Kemp) are accidentally feasting on each other’s faces — they’re both trying to make out with Helena (Annie Worden), their flavor of the minute, but miss their target — until in the next instant, they’re
rivals again, ripping off their shirts like jungle beasts in preparation for mortal combat.
Yet Rafaeli carves out image upon image of humanity at its most giddily debased. When preening clown Bottom (Marcel Spears) is transformed into a donkey, and fairy queen Titania, beholden to him by the magic love juice, leads him out on a leash that matches the harness she wears, never has a creature so trotted with pleasure at the prospect of being tethered.
When Worden’s Helena happens upon Linnard’s Lysander and Jenny Nelson’s Hermia, Rafaeli makes it clear Helena isn’t entering just because; she’s cock-blocking, obliviously yet flawlessly. Later, when Helena tries for the umpteenth time to woo Demetrius, Worden finds an inflection that’s so current you might forget which play you’re watching. She’s the awkward kid in the hall at high school, a comedian who’s bombing and knows it and tries to make her awareness of her failure into a joke, but that fails, too.
Rafaeli’s direction sometimes feels as if it’s throwing everything out there to see what sticks, rather than pointing every choice, every device toward a single, clear-cut goal. And some of her cast members haven’t yet escaped the mode of delivery that treats Shakespearean verse as if it’s on an altar, to be proclaimed reverently and poetically, instead of an urgent thought that must be spoken, right now, by a live, flawed human.
Yet for surgical precision and sage clarity, there’s the redoubtable Rami Margron in the dual roles of fairy king Oberon and Athenian king Theseus. Margron conjures visions almost tangible from Shakespeare’s wilder verse. When Oberon says, “the eastern gate, all fiery-red, opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, turns into yellow gold his salt green streams,” it’s as if the hues shoot forth, with so much energy does Margron honor each successive descriptor. The actor disentangles knotty syntax, as if Margron is always saying, “Look, here’s what’s important in this line,” but in a way that springs from character and situation, not from didacticism.
It’s kingly, immortal grace in a show all about the humiliation of being human. Maybe that’s partly why Margron’s two characters always seem a bit darker, a bit more distant and brooding than everyone else in Rafaeli’s world. These kings look on bemused or mildly regretful at the subjects they toy with and rule. Maybe they wish, for all their dignity, they could feel what we feel.