Collaborative Theatre Project’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Collaborative Theatre Project (CTP) has been in operation since 2016, and I have seen several productions there in the past eight years, including all of the 2024 season up to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was on stage from June 20 to July 21, 2024.

CTP has a 90-seat black box theatre in a fixed-seat configuration, which imposes some staging constraints, not least in terms of sight lines; action taking place at floor level risks being fully visible only to those on the front row. I hope that this is a matter to which the CTP Board will turn its attention.

The space includes an Art Gallery, displaying works by local painters, and CTP also runs workshops and performances for children (sometimes in both Spanish and English), details of which are published on the company’s website.[1]

In its 2024 season, CTP started offering matinees on Saturday instead of evening performances, and it will no doubt monitor the impact of this innovation. It continues to include staged readings in its activities alongside full productions, although these are no longer presented as radio plays. The company includes actors of varying ages in its productions.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was not the first Shakespeare play to be staged at CTP. There was a production of Macbeth in 2022, and CTP has staged productions of such Shakespeare-related plays as Book of Will in 2021 and Bernhard/Hamlet in 2023.[2] This offering, however, proved to be something special.

Audiences for A Midsummer…