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A Midsummer Night's Dream
Presented by Shakespeare on the Sound at Pinkney Park, Rowayton, Connecticut and Baldwin Park, Greenwich, Connecticut. June 16-28, 2009 and July 4-12, 2009. Directed by Joanna Settle. Original songs and score by Stew. Designed by Andrew Lieberman. Lighting by Adam Silverman. Sound by Obadiah Eaves. Choreography by David Neumann. With Jesse J. Perez (Puck, Philostrate), Mickey Solis (Theseus, Oberon), Doan Ly (Hippolyta, Titania), Ty Jones (Nick Bottom), Marjan Neshat (Hermia), Gretchen Hall (Helena), Albert Jones (Lysander), Gregory Wooddell (Demetrius), and others.
Many of the actors in Joanna Settle's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream are first generation Americans (entirely by chance, according to the director), and the cast resembled the racial diversity of a large American city: African-American, Vietnamese-American, Iranian- American, Mexican-American, Irish-American. When Puck and Oberon argued about the confusion of the lovers, they suddenly launched into a heated argument in Spanish. Doan Ly's Titania spat out several lines of verse in Vietnamese to curse Oberon. The production was not about racial diversity, but rather about the borderlands that actors in the Dream must inhabit. Settle's Dream exposed the liminal spaces of the play. The traditional dichotomy of "the fairy world" and "the mortal world" dissolved before our very eyes. The audience was often treated to a Brechtian peek behind the veil of illusion when we saw Puck and Oberon not only as Shakespeare's characters, but also as first generation Mexican-American actors as well. The doubling of Titania and Hippolyta, Oberon and Theseus, and Puck and Philostrate accentuated the fluidity and release of the characters: by the end of the play the actors were shape-shifting, almost playing both characters at once. The...