Word: pyramus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...with anyone at all, scarcely stopping to ascertain identity, or even sex. Titania's sudden passion for ass-headed Bottom seems almost natural in the age of Ecstasy, when someone who takes a tab of MDMA is liable to open her heart to the first person she sees. And Pyramus and Thisbe, wooing each other through a chink in a wall, might almost be model paramours -- paragons, in fact -- for the "safe sex" generation...
Lapine is a skillful sight gagster. His staging of the Pyramus and Thisbe play-within-the-play is a little masterpiece of smartly timed slapstick. And having his quartet of young lovers lose bits and pieces of their costumes in their befuddled woodland wanderings is an apt comic comment on the larger losses of sexually addled adolescence. Among them, Christine Baranski turns Helena into that most endearing of creatures, a beautiful woman humanized by near terminal klutziness...
...least marvel about this Dream is Epstein's ability to draw humor from the play even as he is interpreting it in an essentially solemn way. We expect the rustics and their "Pyramus and Thisbe" to be a comic staple, and certainly John Bottoms's eponymous, stage-struck Bottom, Jeremy Geidt's paternal, befuddled Quince, Max Wright's scallion-chomping Flute and their cohorts dig up laughs you'd only guessed at, reading the play. But the young lovers, too, keep their scenes from bogging down into indistinguishable, interchangeable laments: Sloan's strong-willed and-armed Helena gets a hapless...