American Players Theatre's trippy 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' a gift to fans

In his program notes for the American Players Theatre production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – now playing in APT’s outdoor amphitheater in Spring Green – director John Langs stakes the claim that there’s no play better suited to this stage than “Midsummer.” 

You’ll likely agree after watching Langs’ smart and splendiferous “Midsummer.” It was the play that opened APT nearly 40 years ago; it was the play chosen to consecrate the new stage APT unveiled this year. Langs’ “Midsummer” looks back at what was while celebrating this play’s great theme: the transformations through which we continually change and grow.

Related:American Players Theatre embraces roots while expanding

Take Jonathan Smoots, who played Theseus in that first “Midsummer” in 1980 and does so here again in 2017. 

Dressed as a king for a classical production, Smoots was so much older, then.  He’s younger than that now, sporting a contemporary summer suit that’s accessorized with Grecian folds.  So yes: this is the man who rules classical Athens.  But he’s also a man for all seasons, revised for the times and true to APT’s mission of honoring the classics while making them new.  

We’re made aware of what’s new even before the play begins; audiences takes their seats to a thrumming world beat composed by choreographer Ameenah Kaplan, whose dances will take us to the Middle East, New Orleans and Latin America before we’re through.  Before Smoots speaks the play’s first lines, we watch the 28-actor cast dancing in the streets.  They’ve been led there by street urchins: children offering another reminder that the future is now.

To get there we’ll need to uncover our own long-buried child, and that requires leaving civilized Athens for a trip to the woods.  Featuring the twangling instruments showcased in co-composer Josh Schmidt’s homage to the summer of love, these are among the most trippy and least scary woods I’ve experienced in any production of “Midsummer.”

But are they ever fun. Playing Puck and continually stealing the show, Cristina Panfilio will have it no other way. 

Sure, she takes her orders from Oberon (Gavin Lawrence). But with her mischievous love of play, she can’t help but go awry; this manic Puck’s nifty fairy wings only droop when she’s witnessing others undo the mayhem she’s caused. Panfilio even includes the audience in her games, urging our active participation and transforming APT’s Hill Theatre into People’s Park. 

As with Smoots back in Athens, so too, here: Costume designer Murell Horton highlights these characters’ metamorphoses. 

John Pribyl’s transformed Bottom isn’t the only one who is both human and animal; ditto cloven-hoofed Oberon and Titania (a terrific Colleen Madden) as well as the sprites attending them, wearing tattered clothes that seamlessly blend with exposed skin and the colors of the natural world.

Even the quartet of young lovers follows suit; the longer they’re in the woods and the more confused they grow about what – or even who – they want, the more bespattered and bedraggled they become, setting up a farcically funny rendition of the play’s great fight scene as they succumb to Oberon’s love potion number 9.

At first blush, only the play’s working stiffs seem incapable of such transformation, the changes involving an ass-like Bottom notwithstanding. 

Here again, Horton’s costuming nails it: Emphasizing how literal the mechanicals can be in a play where everything and everyone else tilt toward metaphor, he dresses them in the tools of their trades. Ty Fanning’s Snout the tinker makes a racket carrying his pots and pans; Xavier Roe’s Starveling the tailor is dressed to kill. You get the idea.

But as Bottom’s donkey dream drives home, even this motley crew is transformed by what neither eye nor ear experience in everyday life. An example:

Initially uncomfortable at playing a woman in the mechanicals’ play within the play, Casey Hoekstra’s Flute eventually warms to his role.  We may laugh at his melodramatic Thisby, but we’re also moved by what he’s become.  He’s expanded his and our sense of all we might be, within a play and a theater that’s been making such magic on midsummer nights for a long time. 

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” continues through Oct. 8 at APT’s Hill Theatre.  For tickets, call (608) 588-2361 or visit americanplayers.org/.  Read more about this production at TapMilwaukee.com.

PROGRAM NOTES

Helena, Helena, Helena: As she climbs the aisle to exit the theater after being dispatched yet again by Oberon, Panfilio continually recites Helena’s name to herself as a mnemonic, the better to keep straight that it’s Helena – rather than the similarly named Hermia – she’s to go find on this particular errand. Puck can be forgiven her confusion, caused by Oberon’s initially unclear instructions and reflective of what the late, great Anne Barton noted long ago, in one of her justly famous essays introducing Shakespeare’s comedies: the play’s quartet of young lovers are nearly interchangeable. 

Langs runs with this, particularly in the volatile relationship between once and future lovers Demetrius (Nate Burger) and Helena (APT newcomer Elizabeth Reese).  Even when they’re supposed to be apart, they nearly come together, intoxicated by each other’s words. The resolution of their differences brings them back to who they once were; meanwhile, Hermia (Melisa Pereyra) and Lysander (Juan Rivera Lebron) move toward what they might become, traveling from an initially self-centered and declamatory view of love toward mutuality.

Jonathan Smoots: Langs gives us more of Theseus than we usually get, particularly in lines toward play’s end that are frequently cut.  What emerges is a more complex character than the self-satisfied conqueror we see at the top of the show (including here, where Laura Rook’s Hippolyta has reason for beginning the play resenting him and men generally).

Theseus, too, is transformed by the magic of the night, into someone who cultivates empathy and champions the power of the imagination when insisting that the retinue surrounding him give the mechanicals and their play a chance.  As presented by Smoots, what we get is the sort of character Smoots plays so well: paternalistic and a bit full of himself, but also smart, droll and wryly aware of human foibles, thereby making him more tolerant.   

Colleen Madden: Since this particular production of “Midsummer” is self-consciously cognizant of APT’s storied history, let’s pause to reflect on the brilliant career, here, of one of the actors who shines in this production. As Titania, Colleen Madden dances and sings, but she’s been doing that at APT for 17 years, even when she’s ostensibly still and speaking in prose.  Listening to her Titania mourn the disorder in the natural world, I traveled back in my mind to a muggy September Saturday in 2001, when I first saw Madden perform in this same space, playing Sonia in a production of “Uncle Vanya” I will remember all my life. 

I’ve seen nearly everything Madden has done since, including all her work at APT.  But I never cease to be awed by her range, or her ability to show me something new within characters and plays I thought I knew.  Madden’s Titania is not just the stereotypically temperamental – and, during her Bottom phase, stereotypically smitten – creature we usually see.  Madden could have given us that; in a production as sunny as this one, it would have been plenty. 

But as she regularly does, Madden dug for more, finding a deeper and more desperate unhappiness within a woman who, even as she fawns on Bottom, appears antsy and agitated. This Titania isn’t just drunk on Oberon’s love juice. She’s also experimenting with what it might mean to reconcile having a life and things of her own with all that’s required by partnership with her jealous and possessive husband.  That’s what the fight over the changeling boy is all about; surrendering him to Oberon means forfeiting a piece of her own history and identity, involving a woman (the boy’s mother) Titania had dearly loved. 

This Titania subconsciously knows that Bottom is an ass, but at least he’s hers.  She’s nevertheless agitated because some part of her she can’t even acknowledge knows Bottom isn’t enough. For Titania doesn’t just want control.  She also wants genuine love.  She has a touch of Madden’s Katherina in an APT “The Taming of the Shrew” (2002) and a touch of her great Beatrice in an APT “Much Ado About Nothing” (2014).  Madden may now be playing a fairy, but her Titania keeps company with such women, trying to be true to themselves without being forever alone.      

Creating the Circle: Also befitting a production that self-consciously honors APT’s history, this “Midsummer” features a scenic design by 20-year veteran Nayna Ramey.  What she gives us is a series of circles, including a stationary turntable on which much of the action unfolds and, most prominently, a jeweled moon that’s inset within what I can best describe as a series of curved poles (there are numerous straight and curved poles within these “Midsummer” woods, suggesting something akin to a jungle gym in a production with plenty of young people and a lively sense of play). 

Those circles reflect the different worlds – court, fairy kingdom, young lovers and rude mechanicals – who’ll come together in this play, creating a much bigger circle than the one that’s initially broken when this production’s opening dance party is destroyed by discord.  By showcasing the moon, Ramey honors the nighttime orb that’s continually referred to in this play – understandably so, since the changes taking place here unfold under its ethereal, mysterious light.  

Expanding the Circle: Long before Panfilio’s Puck extends her hands to the audience in the play’s final lines, that circle has expanded to include the audience, joined within an amphitheater holding patrons and actors alike as part of one community.  While I don’t want to spoil the fun, suffice it to say that audience participation plays an integral role in this production, in ways that are clever and feel organic rather than, as is usually the case with such endeavors, clunky and cheesy. This “Midsummer” is clearly intended as a gift to APT’s fans, joined with the actors as part of one big communal dance in which we collaborate to make the magic happen. 

Literally true, of course: As actors elsewhere are sometimes wont to forget what APT itself never does, it’s those attending APT performances and donating to APT who make all this play in the woods possible.  How refreshing to see a company not just give lip service to this idea, but also bake it into an actual production – recognizing that the circled stage on which actors play their parts is a microcosm of the great globe itself, in which the stuff of collective dreams like this enchanting “Midsummer” round our lives before we sleep.