Theater: Magic Act

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

by William Shakespeare

There could not be a more perfect setting for A Midsummer Night's Dream than the New York Shakespeare Festival's open-air theater in Central Park. The scenery takes full advantage of the fact that there is a real lake for a backdrop and real stars are a twinkle in God's Own Cyclorama. The greens that fill the stage are genuine trees, shrubs and grass, implanted on a gently rolling surface that could not be more naturalistic if someone had dug up a wood near Athens and shipped it to Manhattan C.O.D. Unlike the more self-conscious conceits that have been lavished on this most visually entrancing of Shakespeare's works, Heidi Landesman's scenery charms through its understated appropriateness.

But when, at the beginning, Philostrate, master of King Theseus' revels, makes his way through the underbrush and starts doing card tricks, he creates a mild sense of foreboding. Magician Ricky Jay is a deft dealer, but his sleight of hand tips the hand of Director James Lapine. This will be an evening of chipper invention, but one that will skirt the deeper, darker depths of this forest, where magic turns to mystery and the tumbling appearance of the fairy kingdom's wayward spirits becomes a metaphor for the wayward heart's enigmatic leapings.

Lapine is a skillful sight gagster. His staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-the-play is a little masterpiece of smartly timed slapstick. And having his quartet of young lovers lose bits and pieces of their costumes in their befuddled woodland wanderings is an apt comic comment on the larger losses of sexually addled adolescence. Among them, Christine Baranski turns Helena into that most endearing of creatures, a beautiful woman humanized by near terminal klutziness.

The disease, alas, is catching. The source of the sorcery, the chief spinners of this Dream, must be Puck and his master Oberon, king of the fairies. Lapine's boldest experiment is to cast a woman (Marcell Rosenblatt) as Puck. But she has been directed to substitute screeching tomboyishness for sly sprightliness, and the resulting overaggressiveness is painful to watch, something like seeing the only girl on a Little League team overcompensate for her gender. Oberon is done to a star turn by William Hurt (Body Heat), who is so in love with the sound of his own voice that he refuses to let Shakespeare's be heard. He mashes the meter and minces a large portion of the play's enchantment in the Cuisinart of his ego. It is a measure of the play's richness that some of its sweet essence survives such thoughtless processing.

—By Richard Schickel