Word: epsteins
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...group of performers with vocal skill, physical agility, and intellectual acumen. They present in transcendent clarity--sometimes in neon signs--the question at the heart of Shakespeare's play: how to create marital tranquility out of the irrational workings of love. Most of the refinements and elaborations director Alvin Epstein introduces serve not to obscure but to subtilize the issue...
Foremost among these is Epstein's appropriation of Henry Purcell's score for The Fairy Queen, with chorus, soloists and instruments of the Banchetto Musicale, as a means both to lengthen and to enrich Shakespeare's play. The backhanded slap at Mendelssohn's romantic score, with its pianissimo fairies and ebullient wedding march, makes clear even before the lights go up the director's vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream: counterpoint over harmony. If the music doesn't bring that message home, Epstein has added a brief masque to accompany the overture: before a Paolo Uccello-like tapestry...
With less care this discord-first interpretation could turn the Dream into a rowdy cockfight, with lovers, parents, fairies and rustics tussling through scene after scene. But Epstein draws nearly all of his conflict from the text--except for an amusing pre-marital spat between Theseus and Hippolyta that makes some dramatic sense but seems only marginally present in Shakespeare's original. Everywhere else, the conflicts in this production neatly fit into a world thrown out of kilter by the feud between Oberon and Titania, the presiding deities. The explosive initial entrance of the lovers and Egeus, grunting and panting...
Tony Straiges's set does more than its share to point up Epstein's intent. If the battle-tapestry that represents the court overstates the theme of conflict, its one-dimensionality perfectly sets the city off from the wood; as the tapestry rises it reveals no lush, enchanted garden but a Greenwood of primal forces, spaciously expanding sideways and upwards towards the silvery moon--a stark, haunting vision of nature largely unconcerned with or uninterested...
Skinner, with Robert Epstein and Robert Lanza, set up an experiment involving two white male pigeons whimsically dubbed Jack and Jill. Kept in adjoining Plexiglas cubicles, the pigeons were taught by Skinner's conditioning techniques to recognize and depress keys that were identifiable either by color or by words or symbols embossed on them. If they hit the right key with their beaks, it would light up and, as a reward, they automatically got a little grain...