A Midsummer Night’s
Dream at the Delacorte Theater.
Alex Hernandez and Annaleigh Ashford in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
The
question of whether Annaleigh Ashford is God is at this point open, but an
addendum to her rapidly broadening scriptures can be found at the Delacorte
Theater in Central Park, in Lear deBessonet’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which runs
through August 13th.
Ashford’s Helena doesn’t so much steal the show as much as renders it
irrelevant by comparison. She is one of
the world’s great physical comics, and her jerky, Harpo Marx-tinged jilted
lover represents a completely different approach to her art than either her
fluid Essie Carmichael in 2014’s You
Can’t Take it With You or her lusty dog in the 2015 Sylvia; she represents the only convincing reason to see the play.
Not that
deBessonet doesn’t do her best. Long
relegated to the gala productions of new, hastily assembled Shakespeare
musicals that play the Delacorte in September, she brings to Midsummer, her Shakespeare in the Park
mainstage debut, a taste for agreeably frothy surplus reflected in David
Rockwell’s fairy-lit set and Clint Ramos’ remarkably loud costumes. A band plays New Orleans-inflected swing, and
Marcelle Davies-Lashley, a great singer, wails Justin Levine’s new
compositions. The cast is stacked –
Ashford, Phylicia Rashad, Danny Burstein, Kristine Nielsen, and more. The atmosphere is celebratory and in hopeful
search of a new approach to the material, but none’s found – the fairy monarchs
Oberon (Richard Poe) and Titania (Rashad) are tedious; Burstein’s game as Nick
Bottom but doesn’t bring anything new to the character (as he didn’t in the
latest Fiddler); Nielsen’s Puck is
playful and meta – forever glancing over her shoulder at the audience as Oberon
pontificates – but less than worthy of her evident talent.
Most
disappointingly of all, deBessonet cannot salvage the bulky and dramatically
inert second act. The warring couples –
Helena and Demetrius (Alex Hernandez), Hermia (Shalita Grant) and Lysander
(Kyle Beltran) – are married five minutes in, and the drama resolved, to make
way for a play within a play led by Bottom, a wannabe actor, and several
attempts at an ending. (DeBessonet
doesn't help matters by making each one – especially the wild dance party
fronted, once more, by the remarkable Ashford – feel more final than the
last.) Though it looks gorgeous, it
feels something like a waste of time.
Those
lovers are by default the most exciting of the various interlocking storylines,
if only because, at the risk of repeating myself, the show makes sense when
Ashford is on stage. Her specificity and
precision as an actress cannot be overstated, and her presence makes her fellow
actors better, especially Hernandez and Beltran. When Nielsen’s Puck rubs the
flower of love in their eyes to cause them to fall for Helena, their energy
level, too, seems to magically jump, and one particular scene, a brawl among the four lovers, comes close to theatrical Nirvana. But it’s over all too soon, and Titania must
be given room to drone, Puck to giggle, Bottom to ham.
And the
thing is – it’s nobody’s fault. From
director on down, every participant in this production is professional,
polished, and energetic. But it’s the wrong play. There’s something appealing about doing Midsummer in the middle of the park,
wild and woolly and yet magical in its order and location. But the text is by and large weak, one of the
only plays Shakespeare didn’t crib from some other source, and it shows. As with The
Tempest, the author falls over himself at play’s conclusion to apologize
for his own work – the impish fairy Puck tells us "You have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear / And this weak and idle theme / No more yielding but a dream.” The haze and color and intermittent glory of
deBessonet’s production is rather like a dream, if only a dream that some day,
some way, Annaleigh Ashford will find the platform she deserves.
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