The idea that a 400 year old play could pack theatres, even in the age of film, television and YouTube would usually be laughable.
It would if the author were any other than the Bard himself: William Shakespeare. On Feb. 11, the American Shakespeare Center played A Midsummer Night’s Dream for a full crowd at the Harriet Fulton Theatre, filling the packed house with palpable excitement and raucous laughter and applause.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream first premiered in 1605.
The touring company, true to the roots of Shakespearean theatre, played music before the performance and during the intermission, doubled their parts (often with humorous results), and ran the entire production under the house lights, thus simulating the broad daylight that would have lit the stage of an amphitheater like Shakespeare’s Globe.
Leading the cavalcade of actors through the play were standout performers Chris Bellinger (as both Theseus and Oberon), Madeline Calais (as Robin Goodfellow), and Topher Embrey who cut a very remarkable Bottom, the weaver.
While the production itself was excellent, it underscored the staying power of the man considered the greatest playwright of the English language. Like it or not, since his death, Shakespeare has been and will continue to be a fixture of American and world culture as long as the English tongue is spoken.
And the brilliance of Shakespeare is, as Tuesday demonstrated, not only appreciated by scholars, but by the general public as well. A poet who can pack theatres for 400 years with people from every social strata is surely a precious cultural gem.
