Word: theseus
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...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, the helmeted figures of Theseus and Hippolyta have it out with swords (Hippolyta wins...
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...
...have to squint hard to find inconsistencies like these, though, and aurally if not physically the music works. More curious and ironic is the presence onstage of Robert Brustein, ART's director and a philosopher of the theater in his own right, as Theseus, that unrepentant skeptic with no faith in drama or poetry. This, after all, is the character who delivers the famous speech lumping lovers, poets and madmen together as creatures of imagination, flighty and deluded...
...requires a powerful imagination indeed to suppress an involuntary wry smile when you hear Brustein's Theseus remark, of actors, "The best in this kind are but shadows." Perhaps--just as Shakespeare's play is "only" a dream. At the Loeb, both shadows and dreams seem, if only while the curtain is up, to take on a radiant and tangible form all their...
...Ariadne, but only her pedestal is found. The Count is seduced by her laments, which only he -and the audience (Ariadne's music is on pre-recorded tape)-can hear. He redeems himself through a sort of Wagnerian metamorphosis in which he firs thinks of himself as Theseus, then realizes that the Countess (splendidly sung by a young newcomer, Soprano Cynthia Clarey) is his real-life Ariadne after all Ariadne is a delightful romance, and a the final curtain last week, the audience responded with long applause and bravos. Sharing the reception onstage was Musgrave, who had spent...