SF
Weekly , April 6, 1997
Michael Scott Moore
Parking
Shakespeare
Any
theater troupe trying to do Shakespeare in the park has to risk being
reduced by children, dogs, traffic, and wind to looking like a bunch of
random weirdos mouthing archaic lines. The Shotgun Players have gotten
around that problem, mostly, by choosing a play that lets them use puppets.
Their version of A Midsummer Night's Dream is a papier-mache fantasy
of fairies that look like animals. The cast wears no costumes, so the
opening scenes fall back on pure dialogue to introduce the story, which
doesn't always translate in the park. While Hermia gets formally condemned
to an unwanted marriage to Demetrius, and flees into the woods around
Athens to elope with her lover, Lysander, the wind carries away some crucial
lines, kids act restless, and a dog runs onto the stage.
But
the show improves when the puppets come on. Oberon and Titania look like
male and female cats, life-size puppets attached to Kevin Karrick and
Karra Tsiaperas; the attending fairies are smaller animals, including
a snouted rodent with horns and a bird in a livery costume; for some reason
Puck looks like a boar, and maybe the best way to describe Peaseblossom
is to say he doesn't look unlike a blue guinea pig with scales.
The
heart of A Midsummer Night's Dream goes roughly like this: Puck
has been ordered as a joke by the Fairy King Oberon to anoint his wife,
Titania, with a potion that will make her fall in love with the first
person she sees. Puck touches her with the potion and then changes the
head of a stray actor named Bottom into the head of an ass, and lets Titania
fall in love with him. Lysander and Demetrius, sleeping in the woods,
also get touched by the potion, and fall in love with Demetrius' ex-girlfriend
Helena. This is inconvenient for Hermia, who's trying to elope with Lysander.
The
Shotgun Players are a young crew, so the show works best when they're
playful. When Lysander and Hermia bed down for the night, Hermia pulls
out a hair dryer but can't find a place in the forest to plug it in. When
Helena and Hermia argue, Helena calls her rival a "puppet." Sometimes
the actors overextend themselves to be heard, especially Marin Van Young,
who forces her lines as Hermia. "Keep word, Lysander: We must starve our
sight/ From lovers' food till morrow deep midnight" doesn't need to sound
hysterical. When Hermia grows furious, though, Van Young is funny; she
seems to enjoy beating up on people. Kevin Karrick, as Theseus and Oberon,
has a good sense of the balanced, fairy tale-ish postures he needs as
king; and Michael Storm is good in the same way, as Bottom, with a projecting
voice that doesn't strain. Maybe the secret to A Midsummer Night's
Dream is not to take it too seriously, and Karrick and Storm have
the right self-detachment to make their performances dance.
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