Playwright: William Shakespeare. At: Chicago Shakespeare Theatre at Navy Pier, 800 E. Grand Ave. Phone: 312-595-5600 or www.chicagoshakes.com; $44-$75. Runs through: April 8
Oh, here we go again—Bottom and Puck, Oberon and Titania, lovers, fairies, louts, “what fools these mortals be” la-la-la. The decision-makers at Chicago Shakespeare are no fools, however, and have called in director Gary Griffin—one of Chicago’s foremost transformers of donkey’s ears into peaseblossom purses ever since his storefront days—to put the fun back into this cumbersome classroom classic. Some of the devices he employs in this production:
1) He greets us at the doors with a framed picture of an Arthur Rackham-style forest and a Victorola churning forth scratchy early-1920s ditties.
2) He opens the play with the Mechanicals warbling doo-wop harmonies in preparation for the upcoming festivities at court, providing us with the backstory thereon.
3) He characterizes Theseus as a stodgy upholder of the status quo, drawing a tepid response from his bride-to-be—the better to heighten the contrast with their emotion-driven pastoral counterparts.
4) He envisions Puck as a goblin hermaphrodite, garbed in shaved head, corset, cravat and gartered socks (gotta carry those enchanted flowers somewhere), after emerging from the image of a tweedy, cigar-smoking Sigmund Freud.
5) He assigns the lovers’ woodland scenes to fight director David Woolley, who injects an abundance of tussle-and-tumble physical comedy, enabling the giddy youths to deliver their cupid-besotted nonsense very quickly.
6) He presents Oberon and Titania’s kingdom as a pageant of tactile East Indian color and sensuality to dazzle our eyes. (Mara Blumenfeld’s fairy-hats alone are enough to keep us occupied during passages of unnecessary euphuism.)
7) He instructs sound designers Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen to set the Pyramus-and-Thisbe burlesque to music, with styles ranging from Appalachian string band to Deep South blues, thus eliminating any need for ham-handed actorly shtick.
Elizabeth Ledo, despite a voice suffering under the weather on opening night, all but stole the show, playing a grotesque and thoroughly charming Puck, and Timothy Edward Kane, fresh from his marathon performance in An Iliad, had yet to find Oberon’s psychological center. Nevertheless, when an audience—on a rainy night, yet—enjoys itself as enthusiastically as that who cheered and applauded each individual episode in this 400-year-old fable, there can be no doubt that Griffin’s revitalizing wizardry has triumphed once again.