Word: stagings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Like a child distracted by the strange things mentioned in the poem, the narrator's voice lingers, hurries, skips, stretches and yawns. In a similar peripatetic fashion, three screens hung above the stage project slides of clippings from a 1923 magazine, echoing in an offhanded and unobtrusive way images and objects mentioned in the poem, while two huge panels of spotlights blink lazily like cows into gorgeous rainbow colors in rhythm to the music and words...
...first act is staged much as Dame Edith Sitwell first performed the play in 1923 to a baffled and exasperated audience in Aeolian Hall in London. The stage is mysteriously covered in movers' white sheets, while the excellent six-piece orchestra (directed by John Major) playfully accompanies in formal black at the center of the stage. Bill Cavness, a local television personality, does the reading, pirouetting through twenty-one highly rhymed, highly rhythmic and almost nonsensical poems. The first act is appropriately restrained and understated, with the audience's attention focused on the music of the words and the orchestra...
Once in the fantastic wood, the balance of dream and nightmare, and the corresponding balance of the two directorial approaches, becomes evident. The second act opens with a fairy dance, choreographed by Cynthia Raymond. As dissonant, atonal music fills the room, dancers gyrate on stage, suggestively entwined. This sequence, no doubt intended to lend an erotic and Dionysian flavor to the production, never fully involves the audience; it is contrived and artificial...
...outstanding performance as the hyperenergetic, cackling Puck, flawlessly capturing the playful and devilish facets of Puck's mischief. Teresa Barger as Hermia and Joanna Blum as Helena are very much the respectively sought-after and frustrated lovers, and vice-versa. Anne B. Clarke as Titania fairly wafts across the stage. Tim Reuben is an appropriately ponderous Theseus, and Jeffrey Rothstein, struggling valiantly with a wrinkled, Bozo-esque bald-cap, nevertheless succeeds as the crabby, meddling Egeus. All five of the Athenian workmen-turned-actors give good performances, but David Anderson as the bellowing, overeager Bottom deserves special notice...
There are some technical problems. Too much action, dancing in particular, takes place at stage level, where it is invisible to all but the first three rows. Some scenes are unimaginatively lit--the stage is flooded with light during a few forest scenes, when shadows and odd lighting angles, suggestive of the fantastic, are in order. Robert B. Sirota's otherworldly music, appropriately evocative for the dance sequences, is distracting when it plays over dialogue...