Julie Taymor’s ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’

And now, once again, she’s working her wizardry. She’s conjured up Shakespeare’s most imaginative comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in an empty black box theater with a budget that’s a fraction of her previous productions (her controversial Spider-Man cost $75 million; her Midsummer cost a mere $2.4 million). Not since Peter Brook’s landmark 1970 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company has there been a Midsummer so minimal and yet so magical.

You’re familiar with the story — one that charts the trials and tribulations of four pairs of lovers over a momentous 24-hour period in Athens and a nearby wood. There’s Theseus, the Duke, and his bride-to-be, Hippolyta, quarreling on the eve of their nuptials. There’s Hermia and Lysander, who love one another, but whose marriage is opposed by Hermia’s father, Lord Egeus. There’s Helena and Demetrius (she loves him, while he loves Hermia). Finally, there’s Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies, sparring in the forest.

It’s a complex story involving many worlds — real and fantastical, civilized and natural, human and animal, courtly and common — so it requires a strong directorial vision to unite all the disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eschewing the “high concept” route that so many directors take in an attempt to outdo one another, Taymor provides that vision with clarity, simplicity, resourcefulness — and a single white sheet.

It begins so disarmingly. You enter the beautiful new auditorium of Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn to find an empty stage, with nothing on it save for a tiny child’s bed, innocently covered in white. A small creature enters — wearing clown’s overalls, a shock of red hair, and a chalk-white face — and slips under the inviting covers. Then the lights go down and the magic begins.

Suddenly, the bedcover billows into a giant white silk sheet about 40 by 50 feet in size. It scoops characters up from the floor to the theater’s ceiling, where they vanish into thin air. It engulfs them and drops them through trap doors under the stage. Alternately, it’s a starry heaven, or a grassy earth, or a giant sail, or a tent, or a backdrop upon which butterflies flit and flowers bloom. It’s constantly moving and changing — from day to night, from civilization to enchanted forest, from the real world to the fairy world.

Changing perspectives

Taymor uses the entire theater space, with the audience seated on three sides of a thrust stage as well as on three levels. She’s directed the action to be viewed vertically as well as horizontally, so that if you’re seated in the second balcony (as I was in the first act), you get the thrill of seeing actors flying to celestial heights, or disappearing down trap doors. Or if you’re seated on the main floor (I moved downstairs for the second act), you’ll be engulfed in a flurry of fairylike creatures flitting through the audience. An added dimension is the upstage wall that changes from a palace façade to a moving scaffold upon which the Fairy King is raised and lowered in the magical forest.

This multi-perspective, gravity-defying production is always in motion, as if airborne, ever transforming. Its dynamic palette is stark black and white, with vivid streaks of silver (bamboo poles that hooded stage hands carry to represent the forest) and splashes of lush purple (costumes and floral projections).

We should be grateful that Taymor has saved Midsummer until this point in her career. She draws upon multiple theater traditions — circus, vaudeville, mime, puppet, and Japanese Noh — whose elements she has polished in her previous works. If you admired her animals in The Lion King, you’ll see a version of them here in the dreamlike forest, where deerlike creatures dance in toe shoes. If you were mesmerized by her hooded puppeteers in The Magic Flute, you’ll see them here in the forest carrying poles upon which birds and butterflies flutter. And if you were awed by those flying spider-men, you’ll marvel at Puck’s perilous 40-foot plunge from theater ceiling to floor, headfirst — or at Titania’s flight in her flowery cradle, beside the donkey-headed Bottom.

Taymor has assembled an able cast to tell the story of these multiple worlds. Standouts include Kathryn Hunter as an amazingly acrobatic, androgynous Puck (half-human, half-sprite), directing traffic between day and night, sleeping and awakening, the real and the fantastical. Regal David Harewood is an imposing Oberon, looking down on Puck’s mischief from his towering perch high above the stage. The “mechanicals” (an acting troupe of workmen) are a merry, motley group, and their slapstick rendition of “Pyramus and Thisbe” in the final wedding scene has never been funnier. To top it all, there’s a company of 20 charming child actors doubling as fairies and wedding guests.

This is a Dream for all ages and stages, radiating childlike wonder as well as innocent eroticism, providing visual thrills as well as an ethereal electronic score. With it, Julie Taymor has reaffirmed her well-earned place alongside Peter Brook and Simon McBurney (Théâtre de Complicité) as one of the most imaginative, inventive theater directors on the world stage today.

To paraphrase Bottom: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen...nor his heart to report what this dream was….It shall be called ‘Julie Taymor’s Dream.’”