By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
It’s not hard to figure out why “A Midsummer’s Night Dream” is Shakespeare’s most staged play.
While star-crossed lovers, vengeful Danes, murderous Scots, and separated twins have their appeal, fairy magic, enchanted and confused young lovers, and a fool with a donkey’s head are a winning theatrical combination for pure entertainment.
And the young thespians of the Horizon Youth Theatre deliver all this theatrical wonder in their production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Cassie Greenlee, on stage at the Trinity United Methodist Church, 200 N. Summit Street, Bowling Green, Friday (Nov. 19) and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $8 and $10 or $35 for a family of four or more. They are available at the door or online.
The play is the usual Shakespearean tangle of plots, starting with the marriage Theseus (Jacobi Edge) and Hippolyta (Rowan Allen) who is becoming the king of Athens’ bride after he has conquered her land.
The preparations for their nuptials are interrupted by the officious courtier Egeus (Charlie Vostal) who wants the king to enforce the law that his strong-willed daughter Hermia (Ren Clifford) must marry the man he selected as her husband, Demetrius (Drew Thomas), or die. She loves Lysander (Rhys Sands). Helena (Reagan Otley) loves Demetrius and to curry his favor she tells him Lysander and Hermia’s plan to flee Athens.
The plot is now afoot as all four enter the forest, the magical realm of the fairies, ruled by Oberon (Harley Partlow) and Titania (Haska Stiegler).
Also in the woods, an ensemble of tradesmen, “rude mechanicals,” have gathered under the direction of Peter Quince (Rose Walters) to stage a play for the royal wedding. Francis Flute (Leo Roberts-Zibbel), Tom Snout (Xander Sands), Robin Starveling (Violet Grossman), and Snug (Alice Walters) are a motley crew, who are quite out of their element as actors. Not so Bottom (Eli Marx), a blustering showboat, up for playing both the male and female leads in the classical tragedy they have planned.
Oberon’s spectral henchman Puck decides to trick the blowhard and gives him an ass’s head.
In a bit of inventive casting, Puck is played by three actors. Aria Weaver plays Puck, the lead, with most of the lines, with Rowan Allen as Robin Goodfellow and Jacobi Edge as Hobgoblin, Puck’s mischievous shadows. They snake through the production together, providing the sprite with a multi-dimensional personality.
Each one of the actors, including Titania’s helpers Cobweb (Fox Roberts-Zibbel), Peaseblossom (Lucy Musteric), and Mustardseed (Izzie Douglass), does their best to invest their character with personality. Part of the excitement of youth theater is seeing the young actors experiencing the world through the mind and body of a different being.
That’s a challenge for those playing the quartet of young lovers when their relationships flip. A magic potion applied to Lysander and Demetrius has them suddenly fixated on Helena. You’d think this outburst of love directed at her would please Helena, who earlier bemoaned her loveless state. Instead she’s suspicious. She believes the guys and even her friend Hermia are just playing a trick on her to make her look more ridiculous.
For her part, Hermia, once beloved by two, is now scorned.
Some delicious bickering ensues with Hermia threatening to scratch out Helena’s eyes. Helena warns “though she be but little, she is fierce.”
The same potion causes Titania to fall in love with Bottom, whose self-regard is not diminished by having a donkey’s head.
All these comic complications resolve themselves suitably with the play ending with the rude mechanicals’ own production. It goes as badly as one could hope. Theseus, Demetrius, and Lysander loudly and rudely critique the performance as it is presented. Yet in the end, Flute, who was very reluctantly pressed into the role of the woman, summons true feeling for his dead lover.
Puck has the last word, asking for forgiveness if the play has offended. No fear of that. This is a dream we’re sorry to be roused from.
