Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Mobile Unit’s fun-loving A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM is as light as air, and it’s a blast

• By drediman
• November 4, 2018
• No Comments

The company of the Mobile Unit’s production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Public Theater.

Sometimes the Mobile Unit treatment can result in productions of Shakespeare that arguably compromise the scope and complexity of some of the Bard’s plays by streamlining, cutting, and speeding through the text to neatly fit into an efficiently-staged 90-minutes. Happily, that’s not the case with the Mobile Unit’s wonderfully unkempt mounting of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is currently enjoying a limited sit-down engagement at the Public Theater’s downtown home base on Lafayette Street (the Mobile Unit tour previously made stops across New York’s five boroughs, making free Shakespeare accessible to those who can’t make it into the city for one reason or another).

Much of the production’s success lies in the play itself. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the irrepressible fairy Puck admits to the play’s dreamlike, dissipating lightness (“And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream …”). It’s a sentiment which director Jenny Koons has taken to heart by staging it as some sort of a laid back, celebratory New York block party, in which performers and audience members alike are likely to have a blast. Many of the productions of this popular comedy that I’ve seen in the past have made the not uncommon mistake of taking themselves a tad too seriously, at times in performance resulting in stretches of admittedly plodding exposition.

What Ms. Koons and her team’s necessarily scrappy, generously-acted production have accomplished is to restore the giddy, almost throw-away lightness of the play. It accelerates through the plot with a fastness and looseness that befits improvisation, and its a joy to behold. Oh, and I don’t think I’ve seen a more joyous rendition of the play-within-a-play “Pyramus and Thisbe” – which in other productions has the potential to be tiresome – but here emerges as the fun-loving heart of the play.

RECOMMENDED

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Off-Broadway, Play
The Public Theater’s Mobile Unit
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 17