Shakespeare In Washington, D. C.

Abstract

passionate production, but his quiet style complemented Olivia Negron's fiery Puck, who flitted about and around the tiny platform, alighting briefly to spit out waspish lines or to drink in Oberon's schemes. This Puck fitly led the other fairies, all diminutive, female, and Tinkerbell-like in dress, but all with Peter-Pan-ish verve and agility. Not surprisingly, Bottom and his crew dominated this very physical Dream. Director Hedley played for the belly laughs, and got a tun of them, through pratfalls, through outrageous costuming, and through mining the Pyramus and Thisby spoof for verbal and visual puns. His mechanicals were expertly clownish, an harmonious team. Patrick Kerr, as Snout, showed the deeply forlorn expression of a helpless man fully aware of the absurdity of playing a wall: a look he maintained constantly during the antics of Robert MacCallum, who, as Flute, minced, curtsied, and falsettoed through the role of Thisby, all the while showing with hang-dog eyes his nervous knowledge that the audience should not be laughing. These worried looks set off the histrionic rapture of O'Connell's Pyramus/Bottom, whose face and manner radiated the confidence of a man preferred by his duke and doted on by the fairy queen. Bottom the ham, the good fellow, the impresario, came through in O'Connell's performance and inspired the entire production. His acting would have stolen a less effervescent show. The puns, the knockabout, and the bright spirits sent the audience home happy. They could have gone home enlightened, too, had not Theseus' perceptive comments in Act V been largely lost due to the atrocious acoustics in the courtyard, a problem the company will have to solve. The stone walls sent the actors' amplified voices up, not out, yet deflected to the audience's ears all the chatter of the Saturday night strollers passing through the square. The solution to the poor acoustics would not be to move the Theatre in the Court, however. Better hearing might be had if money and ingenuity could build a simple heavens of deflector panels above the stage. Moving the show to a quieter setting or, worse, inside, might take from those very nighttime strollers-inner city teens, nightclubbers, tourists-the uniquely pleasurable surprise of discovering the best drama in the world. Moving would surely rob the actors of the thrill of seeing their audience grow from two hundred at the beginning to more than three hundred, seated and standing, black and white, knowledgeable and neophyte, three-year-old and eightyyear-old, at the epilogue. Only in the noisy, midtown milieu can the modern director or scholar experience the refreshing mixture, the holiday