Quintessence presents Shakespeare’s Midsummer and Antony & Cleopatra in rep

Neither are perfect, but both productions feature passion, music, spectacle, and captivating theater. One is a farcical comedy and the other a grand, sweeping historical tragedy, but they both realize the gleeful declaration of the fairy Puck: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!”

All’s fair in fairy love and Roman war

The plays are each oddly structured, with Midsummer acknowledging the story’s strange quality (and the mix of fairies and ancient Greek ritual) in the title. Puck (Lee Cortopassi) and the feuding fairy king and queen, Oberon (Deanna S. Wright) and Titania (the wonderful Christopher Patrick Mullen), romance and magically enchant some humans over the course of one long night in the forest. This means creating chaos among four young lovers and giving the gloriously clueless actor Bottom (Steven Anthony Wright) massive donkey ears. However, the young lovers, including the amusingly irritated Demetrius (Gabriel Elmore), Hermia (Ivana R. Thompson), Sarah Stryker’s amorous, desperate Helena, and Lysander (Tyler Elliott), are already under love’s spell—the fairy intervention just makes their feelings even more confusing.

Antony & Cleopatra shares the poetics of Midsummer, but the material is more bloated than psychedelic: a proto-Hollywood swords-and-sandals blockbuster reporting for duty four hundred years too early. There’s epic sweep to how Triumvir Marc Antony (Tim Dugan) and Queen Cleopatra’s (Wright) passion for one another eventually destroys them, allowing the brilliant Octavian (Cortopassi) to become sole Emperor of Rome. The play spans multiple locations, battles, declarations of devotion, and noble suicides.

At three hours long, even with cuts to the script, it’s overstuffed with incident and drawn-out death scenes. By the time Cleopatra’s maidens (Thompson and Imani Lee Williams) pull a wounded Antony onto an overhanging balcony (thanks to the impressive set from Burns and Santino Lo) and dies in Cleopatra’s arms, he’s been dying for 10 minutes. It’s not a grand tragedy as much as Shakespeare playing up the big scenes for the Groundlings.

“Beauty above all things”

Any faults of the plays (which are, regardless, staggering pieces of literature and poetry) aren’t that of the Quintessence creative team, including artistic director Burns doing triple duty as director, sound designer, and co-set designer; and a game, passionate cast excelling in multiple roles across two verbose productions.

Burns, Lo, lighting designer John Burkland, and costume designers Summer Lee Jack (Midsummer) and Sydney Dufka (A & C) rightly emphasize color, play, and “beauty above all things,” as in Cleopatra’s gasp-inducing leopard print and scarlet dress, decadent disco backlighting, and the red and yellow flowers strewn about the stage when the fairies sing. The company evokes the shimmery romance of Shakespeare’s verse, a place “where the wild thyme blows, where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows.”

Laughs, swoons, and catharsis

I have my quibbles with these productions. Cortopassi is five decibels too loud as Puck for such an intimate theater, but he excels at carrying Octavian’s raging resentment (the moment when he finds out Antony’s dead and bites his thumb in sheer glee is a fantastic performance choice). Burns leans into cinematic techniques with A & C, which works with the lighting scheme, but not when there are giant white subtitles imperfectly projected onto the stage (“ROME”, “THE BATTLE OF ACTIUM”, etc.)

Nevertheless, I laughed, swooned, felt the catharsis when tragic characters met their inevitable fates, and felt, at times, a certain supernatural awe ascend into the atmosphere of the theater. If you see A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Antony & and Cleopatra at the Sedgwick Theater, you may say the same thing.