The Maryland Stage Company's production of Shakespeare's magical A Midsummer Night's Dream is a mixed bag of tricks.
Love is a difficult and sometimes dark struggle in director Xerxes Mehta's interpretation. One of the leads is seriously miscast, and there's far too much yelling for this ethereal comedy to truly work its spell.
But most of the acting is just fine, and Mehta uses some effective (if not especially original) double casting to reinforce one of the play's major themes - the notion that love is blind.
Shakespeare expressed this theme in various ways. In the case of the play's two pairs of young lovers - Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius - love is blind because the couples are virtually interchangeable.
Designer Elena Zlotescu emphasizes this by dressing the men in nearly identical brown Edwardian suits and the women in nearly identical pastel chiffon gowns, and by dyeing both women's hair the same shade of red. And the spirited portrayals by Marni Penning, David Arden Engel, Vanessa Webb-Kabik and Cameron McNary are among the production's best - particularly the scene in which the women engage in an all-out brawl.
The young lovers are one of four sets of characters woven into the narrative. As is a fairly frequent practice, Mehta links two of the other sets - the royal court and the fairy kingdom - through casting. Majestic Scott Sedar portrays Oberon, the fairy king, as well as Theseus, Duke of Athens; Wendy Salkind portrays both Titania, the fairy queen, and Hippolyta, the duke's bride-to-be. The latter is the case of miscasting. Hippolyta is queen of the Amazons, and petite Salkind simply cannot fill the bill; substituting stridency for stature merely accentuates the problem.
Still, seeing the same actors as the royal and fairy rulers helps erase the boundaries between the visible, or real, world and the invisible, or fantasy, one. So does the casting of supple John Wellmann as Puck and Philostrate, attendants to Oberon and Theseus, respectively.
Although there's probably nothing that hasn't been tried before with this play, Mehta finds a seemingly innovative way to blur the line separating the fourth set of characters: the tradesmen, or "mechanicals." The same actor, Bill Largess, plays Hermia's unreasonable father, Egeus, and affable Peter Quince, the carpenter in charge of the hilarious "lamentable comedy" the mechanicals perform at the duke's wedding.
Largess' dual roles remind us that every individual possesses the ability to be either cruel or kind. Similarly, the fluidity with which the various actors move among the play's worlds reminds us that the divisions that separate lovers - and the rest of us, for that matter - are often surmountable.
Of course, the phrase "love is blind" can also mean that love offers a kind of second sight; it allows the lover to see things others cannot. Foreshadowing Edward Albee's 2002 Tony Award winner, The Goat or Who Is Sylvia?, in which a man falls in love with a goat, in Midsummer, Titania falls for a man cursed with the head of a donkey (Dan Manning's droll Bottom, the weaver). Though their physical relationship is portrayed more graphically than might be appropriate for young theatergoers, the intensity of their feelings is undeniable.
Maryland Stage, the resident professional company of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has mounted Midsummer in Center Stage's Pearlstone Theater. Zlotescu, who also designed the set, places the action in a sparse Plexiglas and metallic setting that is anything but the leafy enchanted forest where most of this play typically takes place. It's a setting that, in the end, is less forgiving than the characters themselves, and maybe that's the point.
Midsummer Night's Dream
Where: Maryland Stage Company at Center Stage, 700 N. Calvert St.
When: 8 p.m. tomorrow-Saturday and July 2, 3, 5, 6; 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. June 30 and July 7
Admission: $20 general admission; $10 for college students; high school students admitted free
Call: Call: 410-637-3618