A Midsummer Night’s
Dream Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 2001
Valerie Ross - Metro Santa Cruz
Every summer, Shakespeare Santa Cruz reinvents itself. By the very nature of
its primary theatrical space—the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen—innovation, change and creativity are
the foundations of this unique theater company. Festival set designers must literally build a new stage
in the Festival Glen—from scratch—every year. At the end of the season, they must tear the stage down,
leaving the Glen as pristine and untouched throughout the intervening months as if there were never a
stage there at all.
This simple behind-the-scenes fact guarantees that every season, audiences
will find a theatrical space that is utterly new. The woodland space remains as magical and beautiful
as ever, but each summer it contains a brand new stage that promises fresh visions and versions of
Shakespeare’s timeless plays, as only Shakespeare Santa Cruz dares to reinvent them.
Director Tim Ocel’s version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream blends ancient myth
with modern aesthetics, and 18th-and 19th-century set elements with other worldly costumes and
distinctly 21st century sensibilities. By doing so Ocel skillfully captures the play’s own blend of
multiple realities and layers of mythic history. Balance is the theme behind Ocel’s vision of the play,
reconciling the differences and conflicts between the natural world of magic and love and the man-made
world of law and war. But there is also the war between the sexes to be resolved, in the mortal as well
as the fairy realm, not to mention the class wars between the aristocrats and the working classes who
entertain them.
When the play begins, each of these separate yet interconnected worlds are
noticeably out of balance: Theseus, Duke of Athens, has won his bride Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons,
in battle, and her affections toward him are understandably ambivalent. One of Theseus subjects, and
irate aristocrat named Egeus, is ready to put his daughter Hermia to death according to the letter of
the law if she refuses to marry the man he has chosen for her. While humble craftsmen wrangle over
roles in a play, the furious quarreling of the fairy King and Queen is literally laying the natural
world to waste.
Ocel manifests this universal discord with the intermittent rumblings of an
ominous storm and flashes of threatening thunder and lightning behind the set, which is—at least at
first—a regal 18th-century drawing room consisting of two high gilded walls of faux malachite marble and
delicate golden furniture. The room’s stiff formality is emblematic of the cultural confines
unbalancing the lives of the mortals who pass through its formidable ornamental walls. But when the
scene shifts to the forest for the majority of the play, Ocel’s imaginative manipulation of Nature’s
destructive and creative forces steals the show. When a believable replica of one of the Glen’s
towering redwoods flanking the stage falls with a crack of lightning, the walls of the set buckle and
burst open and the edifice of order is irreparably transformed.
Just as Nature takes over the set, in this production the Fairies easily
dominate the rest of the plot lines with the sheer force of their sex appeal, lyrical beauty and visual
energy, not to mention their alternatively raucous and mesmerizing musical accompaniment created by
sound designer/composer Greg Coffin. As King Oberon and QueenTitania, Bruce Turk and Mhari Sandoval are
powerful, eloquent and seductively well matched amorous rivals whose elaborate dances of love and
battles of words are equally graceful and dangerously exciting. They and their respective retinues are
resplendent in exquisitely ragged assemblages of velvet, chiffon, leather and lace décolletage, designed
by the incomparable B. Modem, whose costumes manage to show lots of enticing skin while conveying a
clear sense of the wild toughness of the natural world that is the fairies’ essence. As Puck, Triney
Sandoval brings the perfect mix of menace, mischievous charm and abundant comic energy to his role,
assisted by a fanfare of heavy metal guitar riffs at his every entrance.
As for the mortals in the play, Tommy A. Gomez’s portrayal of Nick Bottom,
the poignantly buffoonish weaver who longs to be a serious actor, is masterful, even when transformed
with donkey’s ears in hapless Titania’s bower. The rest of the rustic craftsmen give admirable
performances as well, particularly Sam Misner as Flute, whose initial resistance to and final embrace of
the female lead in their comic version of “Pyramus and Thisbe” is admirably sincere.
The Athenian aristocrats are led by Katie MacNichol’s Helena, whose
unrequited romantic antics are skillfully directed—she is surely the first Helena desperate enough to
return the advances of her beloved’s rival, taking affection wherever she can get it. As Hermia, Maria
Dizzia is feisty and sympathetic,while Mike Ryan’s Demetrius and DanielPasser’s Lysander are
surprisingly violent yet laughably self-important. Remi Sandri’s Theseus is suitably regal and
self-interested, just as Amanda Rafuse’s ambivalent Hippolyta shows a perfect balance of disdain and
compassion.
Lighting designer Russell Champa’s moonlight effects are central to the
show’s themes of natural change and magical transformation, and scenic designer Dipu Gupta’s decision to
leave the set only partially restored in the end is the crowning touch of the production. Man made laws
and lives will only find true balance in coexistence with Nature; there must be some cracks in the
mortal edifice in order for a little magic to get through when we need it most.