Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Bernice Kliman (Nassau Community College) Vol 53.2 (Summer 2003): 35, 58

The production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is a delight, with every piece falling into place. Di- rector Kenneth Albers brings to the stage the magic of parallel lives, running in alternate strands but sometimes eliciting in the characters a shiver of recognition. The craftsmen-players who so admire their colleague Bot- tom double as Titania’s henchmen (dressed like Mad Hatter figures from Alice in Wonderland), who tend upon him. No wonder this Bottom feels so at home with them.

The tone is set from the beginning in a wordless exchange between Philostrate, Theseus’s Master of the Revels, and his gentlemen-attendants whom he examines for correct grooming; later, the same actors will play Puck and his attendants (Pucksters) and undergo a similar inspection. These two threads cross when Philostrate in the last scene advises Theseus not to select the craftsmen’s play of Pyramus and Thisby: he has seen the play rehearsed and can- not recommend it. On speaking the line, he does a double take, as if to say, “I saw it rehearsed? When was that?” It was as Puck, of course, that he saw the rehearsal, but Philostrate does not really know that. These links are light as gossamer, delicately connecting the two main settings Court and Woods of this multi-plotted play.

Sandy McCallum is the most plodding Puck in memory, a sprite who would rather send out his helpers than go whizzing around the world himself. And yet, when Oberon commissions him to bring…