Reviewed by: A Midsummer Night's Dream Lawrence Manley A Midsummer Night's Dream Presented by the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, Connecticut. September 14–October 9, 2005. Directed by Kim Rubenstein. Designed by G. W. Mercier. Lighting by Joel Moritz. Original Music and Sound by John Gromada. Dramaturgy by Beatrice Basso. With Christina Rouner (Hippolita, Titania), Tom Nelis (Theseus, Oberon), Mia Barron (Hermia), Markus Potter (Demetrius), Jason Denuszek (Lysander), Stephen Lee Anderson (Egeus, Peter Quince, Fairy), Bill Raymond (Bottom), Raymond McAnally (Snug, Fairy), Carman Lacivita (Flute, Fairy), Brad Love (Puck, Philostrate), and Diane Mair and Jenny Weaver (Fairies). A Midsummer Night's Dream is a notoriously sturdy play, rich in possibilities for a wide range of interpretations and effects. This recent Long Wharf Theatre production, part of the Shakespeare for New Generation series sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, ambitiously took on the difficult challenge of making the play accessible to audiences through broad humor while striving to summon to the stage the heavenly influences through which, the play's poetry suggests, love draws its power to transform. Director Kim Rubenstein (whose previous credits include Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar for the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre) collaborated with designer G. W. (Skip) Mercier on a concept that situated the play's action in a magical universe. In Mercier's design, an enormous circular cutout in the rear wall of the stage was combined with an even larger circular stage which, seeming to have fallen from heaven to earth, opened a portal through the sky to worlds beyond. Into this portal, actors rolled the oversized disc of a brilliant full moon. All of these circular forms suggested analogies among, and possible unities within, the play's different worlds; but the play's action and movements traversed the spaces between these forms—the void beyond and behind the moon out of which the fairies emerged, the airy space in front of the moon's face where the fairies passed in "E.T."-like silhouette, and the foreground forest of the stage, illumined by the changing colors and intensity of moonlight. [End Page 96] The spatial possibilities for interaction among the play's worlds were reinforced by this production's imaginative doubling, which was superbly executed by the relatively small cast of 14. The doubling of Hippolita/Titania (Christina Rouner) with Theseus/Oberon (Tom Nelis) followed a fairly common practice, but to exceptionally fine effect. As the stiff and strained relationship of Hippolita and Theseus in the play's opening scene gave way under moonlight to the wilder and weirder pairing of fairy queen and king, love's magic began to work its charms. But this doubling worked most powerfully in the second shift of roles, as the brilliantly played reconciliation of Titania with Oberon helped to carry the night's magic into the morning hunt of Hippolita and Theseus. Under the spell of the fairy reconciliation, Theseus' praise of the "musical confusion" of his hounds was answered not (as is often the case) by the edgy defiance of Hippolita's memory of hunting with Hercules and Cadmus, but by her rapturous account of the "musical . . . discord," the discordia concors that turns mere confusion into "such sweet thunder." Supporting the production's own discordia concors was the doubling of the mechanicals as fairies, which created an amusing contrast between these oafs in diminutive wings and the more fantastic dancing and graceful acrobatics of their two petite companions, played by the non-doubling Diane Mair and Jenny Weaver. The finest of the mechanicals (and fairies) was the outsized Snug (Raymond McAnally), an innocent giant whose meek manner, shamefast gestures, and soft, lisping Tennessee twang made him an endearing joiner and a pussy-cat lion. Somewhat less successful were Brad Love's Puck, lacking in both animation and mischief, and Bill Raymond's Bottom, played with an energy and crazed abandon that fully exploited the role's broad humor but failed to rise to the more delicate moments of Bottom's night with Titania or his recollection of his "most rare vision." Revved up by Bottom from the beginning of the play, the mechanicals did not have quite enough left in...