A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Storm Theatre)

The Storm Theatre continues its 2003-2004 season with A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, directed by Artistic Director Peter Dobbins. The production stars NFL Hall of Famer John Riggins and former Miss America Kate Shindle.

The main plot of Midsummer is a complex contraption that involves two sets of couples (Hermia & Lysander and Helena & Demetrius) whose romantic cross-purposes are complicated still further by their entrance into the play’s fairyland woods where the King and Queen of the Fairies (Oberon & Titania) preside and the impish folk character of Puck or Robin Goodfellow plies his trade. Less subplot than a brilliant satirical device, another set of characters — Bottom the Weaver, played by NFL running back legend John Riggins, and his bumptious band of “rude mechanicals” — stumble into the main doings when they go into the same enchanted woods to rehearse a play that is very loosely (and comically) based on the myth of Pyramus and Thisbe, their hilarious, home-spun piece taking up Act V of Shakespeare’s comedy.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains some wonderfully lyrical expressions of lighter Shakespearean themes, most notably those of love, dreams, and the stuff of both, the creative imagination itself. If the play can be said to convey a message, it is that the creative imagination is in tune with the supernatural world, and is best used to confer the blessings of Nature upon mankind and marriage.