Shakespeare’s plays are so many-layered that they can absorb almost any kind of interpretation; and the idea of doing a gay-lesbian version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is not all that far-fetched.
The comedy, which features a fairy queen falling in love with an ass and a quartet of lovers enmeshed in great sexual confusion, lends itself to such gender-bending.
Bailiwick Repertory’s “Dream,” presented as part of its annual Pride Series, has some invention in its design and some imagination in its treatment of the play’s sexual aspects.
Those four quarrelsome lovers–Hermia, Helena, Demetrius and Lysander–are as annoying and boring as ever; but, by switching some of their speeches and pairing them off as boy-boy and girl-girl couples, adaptor-director Scott Cooper gives the play’s romance an edgy new slant. Also, by making the comic Bottom the only man among a group of female clowns who aren’t interested in him at all, he creates a different, quirky set of relationships within the comedy’s group of amateur actors.
Unfortunately, too much of the production takes the low route of high camp. Puck, the fairy (Jon Festl), becomes a flitty, squeaky-voiced priss with a body builder’s torso. Titania, the fairy queen (Jay Aubrey), is a flouncing, preening man, with heavy mascara, surrounded by a troupe of willowy male ballet ingenues.
Besides, no matter which way you turn Shakespeare, you still have to master his language, and for most of the Bailiwick players, with the exception of such players as Keven Keys as Bottom and Aaron Hunt as Egeus, that is a challenge unanswered.
Jim Raby’s costume design has several smart touches. Oberon, king of the fairies (Michael Derry), is dressed as a leather bar icon. The petite Jennifer Fisk, as Hermia, wears a baby-doll dress, while her would-be lover Demetrius (Kenner Estes) favors a casual, preppie look.
But these bits of wit are drowned in the general amateurishness of the acting and in the bleak, unfinished, soiled look of the setting of black curtains and no scenery.
Bailiwick, churning out one production after another, may be serving an audience with these quickie, wham-bam stagings, but, at least in the case of this “Dream,” it is underserving the play.
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“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
When: Through Aug. 17
Where: Bailiwick Arts Center, 1229 W. Belmont Ave.
Phone: 773-883-1090
