Poetry slam

Merrimack's scream of a Dream

by Carolyn Clay

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, By William Shakespeare. Directed by Russell Treyz. Set and lighting design by Kendall Smith. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Sound by Daniel Levy. Fight consultation by Robert Walsh. With Robert Walsh, Melinda Lopez, Tracy Oliverio, Denise Cormier, Scott Bowman, Dan Snook, Dan McCleary, David Paluck, Mark S. Cartier, Marc Carver, Lawrence Bull, Joshua S. Scharback, Michael Dorval, and Olivia or Noah Kent. At the Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, Wednesday through Sunday through May 23.

At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, A Midsummer Night's Dream arrives on stage like a burst of gunfire -- and forget about a silencer. The production begins with a prolonged storm of metallic thunder. Theseus, garbed like a member of the trenchcoat mafia, enters throttling a spitfire Hippolyta, who is in handcuffs. When the Athenian warrior duke turns his back on her for a moment, the conquered Amazon queen takes a flying leap and tries to strangle him with her cuffed wrists. A black-shirted Philostrate is packing a gun. And everyone is yelling -- something everyone will proceed to do for the better part of two and three-quarters hours, possibly so that Shakespeare's words will not be drowned out by a physical staging that frequently sounds like body slamming mixed with a stampede. Russell Treyz's production, full of sound, fury, and fisticuffs, is staged in the round. And for those closest to the action, it's more like being in the milieu of Hulk Hogan and Jesse Ventura than in the playing fields of the Bard. Moreover, I warn you, you can get involved -- Puck, hiding from a wrathful Oberon, leapt into the seat beside me and snatched my purse for cover.

Trinity Rep, in Providence, has been both lauded and criticized for its vigorous approach to Shakespearean comedy. Yet Merrimack's attack makes Trinity's look like ambulatory haiku. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most magical -- and popular -- comedies. But I had not realized until now that it is populated by action figures: a She-Ra Titania, karate-chopping Barbies, spear-carrying fairies in African masks. With comedy forced and loveliness sapped, the play becomes a screaming stompathon populated by good actors gone wrong. And who has led them astray? A Drama Desk Award-winning director with a Yale School of Drama degree and considerable quite respectable Shakespeare under his belt.

Obviously, Merrimack and Treyz want to convince their audience that Shakespeare is anything but boring and stuffy. But too much is sacrificed to the pull-any-trick-out-of-the-hat action attack. To take just one example, the powers behind the production clearly understand that the crux of the play is the disharmony, finally resolved, of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania. The act-four coming together of the pair is turned into a formal dance, courtly yet sensual, set to strange strings. Yet Titania's important, and ravishingly lyrical, speech attributing various disruptions in nature to the conflict between her and her fairy spouse ("this same progeny of evils comes/From our debate, from our dissension./We are their parents and original.") is all but lost in a whirl of physical intimidation among the opposing gangs of fairies.

There are some interesting ideas at work here. It's fine for the fairies to be more sinister and animal-like than sprightly -- but must they, like the mortals, be so loud? David Paluck's Puck, like Doug Hara's in the recent Huntington Theatre Company staging, is an agile, simian Pan. And his relationship with Robert Walsh's muscular Oberon is a little like Cheetah's with Tarzan. Paluck's Puck is also something of a satyr -- at one point giving the sleeping Hermia a good humping. For his part, actor/fight consultant Walsh manages better than most to create a safe haven for verse amid all the physicality. Melinda Lopez, both Hippolyta to Walsh's Theseus and Titania to his Oberon, fares less well in that department. But she pulls off the most amazing physical feat of the evening, practically bench-pressing Dan McCleary's Bottom without a flinch.

Among the lovers, mixed and mismatched in the Athenian wood, Scott Bowman's Lysander and Dan Snook's Demetrius are like the Three Stooges compacted into the Testosterone Twins. Denise Cormier is a committed, slightly goofy, strident Helena, and Tracy Oliverio is a pert little fox of a Hermia, stealing off with Lysander in pedal pushers and a satin halter, carting a copy of Modern Bride. The broad, acrobatic comedy created for the foursome is non-stop, over the top, and frequently arbitrary -- though a lot of it is pulled off with aplomb, however pavement-pounding.

This is a production in which the rustics are considerably less relentless, a gentle lot led by the boyish Bottom of Shakespeare & Company mainstay McCleary, whose amateur-thespian weaver is by turns overbearing and vulnerable, not unlike 20th-century proletarian Ralph Kramden in a Hamlet shirt. Once he takes the stage at Theseus's wedding, this Bottom is less strutting than tentative -- particularly after his wooden sword breaks and the whole company of mechanicals get into the frantic act of helping Pyramus to off himself. There are some funny bits here, particularly one involving the collapse of "Wall." But you know you're in trouble when the Pyramus-and-Thisby show seems less ham-fisted and breakneck than the rest of the Dream.