There’s something very different about Denver Center Theatre Company artistic director Kent Thompson’s latest Shakespearean offering.
It’s fun. And it’s funny.
taglove & laughs
When he stages Shakespeare, he typically lets the Bard’s words do the talking. That can result in straightforward productions that are capable and effective, but also a little dry and seemingly not that risky.
But “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” shows a more playful, naughty side of Thompson than we’ve ever seen. It’s more like a midsummer night’s slumber party.
It’s classified as a romance, but here it’s transformed into a silly, giddy comedy set against a murky, dreamlike world of fairies, passion and human asses.
In this relaxed, comic atmosphere, Thompson’s actors indulge in unheard-of, playful asides (listen for who Puck says Oberon looks like). There’s even a moment worthy of Linda Evans and Joan Collins. But then, “Love doth make fighters of us all!”
In the end, you really feel something in your gut.
“Midsummer” is the tale of how true love never did run smooth. It opens in the patriarchal, rational world of Athens, where love is promised and traded like chattel. But once four fiery young lovers venture into the forest, a place closer to our primal natures, the production cannonballs from a slow start into a world of mirth and magic.
Scenic designer John Iacovelli works in tandem with costumer Bill Black and sound designer Craig Breitenbach to create an evocative forest world inspired by the erotic, swirling work of abstract Austrian painter Gustav Klimt. It’s dominated not by forest green, but large, hanging blue cloths that evoke not trees, but perhaps a vertical ocean.
All the better to set a mood where the lines between asleep and awake, love and hate, night and day, man and animal are ever fluid.
This forest world, ruled by fairy King Oberon and his icy Queen Titania, is nocturnal, surreal, sexual. The rigid columns of Athens are replaced by Klimt’s trademark swirls of gold that run all the way down the fairies’ very limbs.
The production takes off when mischievous fairy Puck messes up his directive from Oberon to set right the courses of true love: Lysander’s for Hermia, and Demetrius’ for Helena. As if love ain’t already fickle enough.
Two extended comic scenes carry this “Midsummer Night” to dawn. The first is a vaudevillian, gymnastic display of physical comedy in which Demetrius (Drew Cortese) and Lysander (Leigh Miller) are mispotioned into pursuing poor, abused Helena (Allison Pistorius). Among a dozen bits of keystone comedy, one that stands out has the confounded Hermia (Caitlin Wise) trying to leap into Lysander’s unwelcoming arms.
And later, there’s the laugh- out-loud performance of a play by Peter Quince (Sam Gregory) and his hapless band of actors. In it, Bottom (Larry Hecht) and Flute (Chad Callaghan) riotously play fated lovers Pryamus and Thisbe.
Hecht is the 12-year head of acting for the Denver Center’s National Theatre Conservatory MFA program, and any student of the craft would be wise to watch the professor at work. First, as the deliciously aggrandizing actor who’d like to play every role in the love story — man, woman, and even a lion; and then as the fool whose head is turned into an ass’ and whose heart is targeted for Titania’s poisoned affection.
Hecht accomplishes what so few actors truly can: He makes Shakespeare not sound like a second language. His words, aided by well-timed gestures and inflections, make it all so easily understandable.
But then, most every performance is warm, knowing, and has payoff. The heart of it all is Michael Wartella as Puck in an ebullient performance that’s all the more impressive if you last saw him here as a charming Owen Meany.
Kathleen McCall, so convincing as Emilia in last year’s “Othello,” makes a less obvious Titania. That’s a role often cast with serious actors like her, but you need a Catherine O’Hara kind of comedian to fully mine Titania’s foolish display of drug-induced affection for the ass-faced Bottom.
In the end, of course, lovers and worlds are properly re- aligned — and lovers in the audience walk out holding hands.
Considering the cold snap we’ve been enduring in Denver, this surprisingly passionate evening will likely raise a few body temperatures.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
