Costuming, cast, set all buoy PTC's 'Dream'

Utah theater puts a new spin on play by Shakespeare

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, Pioneer Theatre Company, University of Utah, through March 1 (581-6961), running time: 2 hours and 45 minutes (one intermission)

The Pioneer Theatre Company production of "Midsummer Night's Dream" is pretty and fanciful and bold.

Peter Harrison has designed a starkly effective set. Harrison gives us just the basics: sky and rock and earth.

In Harrison's heavens, a gigantic moon waxes and wanes and turns from yellow to scarlet. When it's time for the forest scene, a few huge thorns drop to the stage. Then Puck enters, swooping down a pole.

The costumes, by Susan Branch, have Puck looking like a Power Ranger and the fairy King and Queen sporting wildly elegant capes. Hers actually floats.

Hippolyta, the human Queen, wears brilliant silks and looks more foreign than the other humans. Hippolyta's clothes remind us that she's been captured, that she'd love to run off, that she'll need to be courted and tamed and even then might never quite fit into high-society Athens.

Paul Barnes directs. He interprets Shakespeare's plot using lots of pantomime and slapstick, most of which the opening-night audience found engaging. Jayne Luke's choreography makes much of exits and entrances and opportunities for acrobatics.

Tarah Flanagan is Hermia. (Here is a woman who understands the comic possibilities of her own feet.) Michael Polak is Lysander, her beloved. Bjorn Thorstad is Demetrius, the man her father wants her to marry. Yvonne Woods is Helena, who's in love with Demetrius.

In costuming and in casting, the Pioneer production highlights the similarities between the men and the differences between the women. It gets you thinking about why we choose the people we choose.

Don Burroughs is the Duke of Athens as well Oberon, King of the Fairies. Celeste Cuilla is Hippolyta and also Titania, the Queen in both worlds. Burroughs is so much more interesting as a Fairy King than as a human that it gets you thinking about Hippolyta's unconscious mind.

Is she dreaming of her Duke as being wilder than he appears? Is that why she is able to reconcile herself to him, at least a little bit, at the end?

Max Robinson plays Bottom. He plays him as less of a buffoon than other Bottoms you may have seen. The play within the play is also slightly different than other productions.

In short, if you think you've seen "Midsummer Night's Dream" enough times, well you haven't.

Sensitivity: A couple of risque gags, but nothing too offensive, and certainly this production makes less of Shakespeare's sexual innuendos than other productions have.

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E-mail: susan@desnews.com

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