Your dose of summer rejuvenation? Fairies, love juice and Shakespeare

San Francisco Chronicle​

28-06-2025

In Shakespeare, sleep is dangerous. Close your eyes, and you might wake up a different person. Or species.
An ass might morph into an actual ass — as in a donkey. Even worse, a fairy queen might fall in hee-hawing, prancing lust for that animal thanks to a heaping dose of magic love juice. More prosaically, that tunnel vision a young person has for the object of their desire? In 'A Midsummer Night's Dream,' love's sightlines have blind turns.
Marin Shakespeare Company's take on the hormone-drenched comedy, which I saw Friday, June 27, at the Forest Meadows Amphitheatre, is a pratfall feast. In Bridgette Loriaux's direction, four young Athenian lovers, the fairies that get up in their business and a troupe of rank amateur thespians preparing a skit for a wedding are always crawling through each other's legs, dragging each other around on the stage floor and munching on their own garments in attempt to rein themselves in.
Demetrius, played by Ixtlan, makes a squirmy-wormy face as if they could escape the amorous clutches of Elena Wright's Helena via grimace alone. Here, lust is ugly. Spurned over and over, Helena rises like a zombie coming back to life, pledging, 'I'll follow thee,' with vocal cords scraping the bowels of the earth. When Adrian Deane's Lysandra turns overnight on Hermia (Storm White), her sometime lover, insulting her as 'You bead, you acorn,' Deane ekes out the words the way a boiling tea kettle starts to whistle.
If Ray Archie's sound design lingers too long, like the looping soundtrack of a video game level you can't beat, you can seek visual respite in Bethany Deal Flores' costumes. The script says that Athenians are recognizable by their mode of dress, and she shows why: Clad all in white, with chunky heels, futuristic cuts, jaunty angles and the occasional feather, they look as if 'Star Trek' characters had been crossed with elves. The underclass acting troupe crosses 'Alice in Wonderland' with steampunk. Think goggles, aviator caps and coveralls, but with a top hat that's actually a spool of thread, a bandolier studded with more spools and an all-white bicycle decorated with lights.
But in this 'Midsummer,' under every surface frolic lies a pool of sadness. You see it in the way Charisse Loriaux (sister to the director) as Athenian queen Hippolyta observes lovers denied the fulfillment she enjoys; in the way the foolish Nick Bottom (Steve Price) awakens from his time as a donkey and wonders at the fairy queen's love he enjoyed; in the way the show acknowledges — with a wordless scene of packed suitcases and a huffy exit — that not everyone gets a happy ending.
The thing is, that character never awakens the way the others do, preferring to stay in his comforting darkness of hate and rage. When the four lovers finally rouse themselves from their turbulence, lighting designer Jon Tracy makes it look like dawn is peeking through a leafy canopy, enchanting the emerald forest floor of Nina Ball's set design.
There's a 'fairy time' of night, in Shakespeare's world and ours. If it's when someone might rub a potion on your eyes, it's also a nightly chance for rejuvenation and renewal. 'Lord, what fools these mortals be!' Puck (Rob Seitelman) complains of the Athenians' thundercloud of passions. But the play's true fool, the one we pity the most, is the one who seals off his heart.