Moonbeams and Menaces

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

For most of the nearly four centuries since it was written, A Midsummer Night's Dream was regarded as one of William Shakespeare's slighter works, an "airy nothing" in the play's own words, of no more substance than a trick that moonlight might play on the eye. But since Peter Brook's landmark rediscovery of the play's darker essence in his 1970 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company, scholars and theatergoers alike have recognized that Dream is much more than a slapstick farce of lovers tangling in a green glade. Its narrative blends wars of the sexes, of social classes, of generations, even a war between the everyday and the supernatural. The play has become a summit that virtually every world-class director seeks to scale.

Rumanian-born Liviu Ciulei, 62, is the epitome of a world-class director: he has staged films, operas and plays in some five languages and ten countries. Since 1981 he has been artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and has burnished the company's reputation for accommodating mainstream audiences to unconventional, often fiercely intellectual interpretations of the classics. Ciulei will leave next year to move to New York City and will become a free-lance director. For his final Guthrie season, he has restored the company's tradition of rotating repertory. Among the current offerings: Cyrano de Bergerac and an adaptation of Dickens' Great Expectations. The highlight of the season, however, is Ciulei's final production as artistic director, an idiosyncratic and brilliant Dream that is probably the best since Brook's.

Ciulei's vision, which downplays romance and sees courtship and marriage as raw struggles for power, owes much to Brook. But the insights into the characters, the reasoned resistance to happy endings and especially the mesmeric visual imagery are Ciulei's own. From the first moment, this Dream shows itself to be more about grim realities and revelatory nightmares. The captive Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Lorraine Toussaint), garbed as a soldier and coiffed with a Grace Jones-style Mohawk, stands mute yet defiant as the guards of Duke Theseus (Gary Reineke) surround her. They tear off her uniform and toss it onto a fire, revealing her torso clad in a confining, seductive undergarment: she is being turned from a woman into a girl. Throughout the play, Hippolyta's fury abates but never completely dies. Ciulei, ever attentive to nuances in the text, points up her poignant reminiscence about lost freedom on the very morning of her wedding.

The production finds the same raw ambivalence in the quartet of lovers. The rivals Demetrius and Lysander come into the forest armed with flick knives. Later, under the influence of a love potion, they are ready to fight and die for love of Helena, whom hours before they both had ignored, and are almost willing to kill Hermia, to whom they both had sworn undying devotion. Even after a restorative drug has returned them to orderly pairings, all four eye one another uneasily: they have lost the sweet certainty of first love. At the curtain call, the pairs come out again mismatched. Only as they start to bow do they exchange partners.

Ciulei perceives class bitterness in passages that are usually taken as innocuously comic. When the sprite Puck is sent off on an errand, he pledges to "put a girdle round about the earth hi forty minutes." The actress playing the part, Lynn Chausow, does not hurry as she speaks, but pauses, then skulks off. When Nick Bottom (Jay Patterson) and his craftsmen offer to dance as a postlude to their fractured production of Pyramus and Thisby, the Duke accepts. Then he and his guests, who have hooted at the ineptitude of these "rude mechanicals," hear the clock strike and head off to bed. The group bursts in, singing and stamping, to find no one there.

The most biting scenes involve Oberon (Peter Francis-James) and Titania (Harriet Harris). This Fairy King and Queen are not lithe spirits but a married couple stung with jealousy engendered by their "open" relationship. After Oberon has contrived to have Bottom turned into a jackass, with whom a drugged Titania will fall in love, he rages at the very infidelity he has brought into being. When Titania wakens from her interlude, she shrieks at her humiliation.

The play's underlying tensions are mimed in a wordless dream sequence that Ciulei has interpolated. As the quartet of lovers crash through the forest, they become enmeshed in gauzy strips of fabric that spin them to and fro, then swaddle them for sleep. During their slumber, their dream selves arise and re-enact the night's confrontations beneath a web of the same gauze. Then the dream form of another nearby sleeping lover, Titania, rises and cavorts with an image of Bottom. He lifts off his ass's head and reveals himself to be Oberon; Titania recoils in horror. Thus the prank with Bottom, the trademark joke of the play, becomes the symbol of all the self-destructive cruelties committed in the name of love.

Neither of the Guthrie's other productions is as good. The better of them is the adaptation of Great Expectations, resembling a smaller-scale version of Nicholas Nickleby. After its Minneapolis run, the production will tour in 33 states. Barbara Fields' script cannot quite capture the rueful tone of the novel, because none of the characters onstage has the consciousness of the adult Pip, who narrates the book. Nevertheless, the story crackles, and the sets and costumes are evocative. Except for Mitchell Lichtenstein as a much too passive Pip, the cast seethes with Dickensian energy. More disappointing is the workmanlike Cyrano. Jack Wetherall employs an old man's raspy voice and world-weary manner in the title role, which is meant to be a model of youthful valor. Still, a company is best judged by its peaks, and with his bewitching Dream Ciulei has cast a moonbeam glow on the Guthrie's reputation as well as his own. --By William A. Henry III