‘Dream’ works in park

What more fitting play for a summer’s evening than Shakespeare’s "A Midsummer Night’s Dream."

And what more fitting setting for that theatrical dream but a park with towering oaks that evoke woodland
where the magical action takes place.
And who more fitting to bring this dream rife with ribald humor and imprecations of lust than a cast of
young thespians who like Peter Quince’s crew in the play act for the love of it.
The Beautiful Kids Independent Shakespeare Company is a far more polished outfit than those amateur
players envisioned by Shakespeare. It takes fine actors to be as outrageously and intentionally bad as
Quince (Jeffrey Adam Guion), Bottom (Justin Betancourt) and the rest (Scott Stechschulte, Chase
Greenlee, Paris Osborne and Alexis Washer) are during their own tragic comedy both "tedious and
brief" that concludes "Midsummer."
It brings the action to a fitting and rousing close capped only by a final appearance of Puck (Trina
Friedberg) who assures us that this is all a passing fancy.
A thoroughly enjoyable one at that.
The play opens tonight at 6 on the Needle Hall Stage in City Park, continues Friday at 6 p.m. and then
concludes with two shows Saturday at 1 and 6 p.m. in the Wooster Center on East Wooster Street. The
production will move to Wooster Center in the event of rain.
In staging the classic, Beautiful Kids directors Christina Hoekstra and Jon Gazda set it in vaguely
contemporary times … all the easier for costuming. But they’ve transformed the magical forest
creatures into stock sci fi characters. Oberon, the king of the fairies, is a mad scientist played by
Slade Billew with cheerful dominance. His queen Titania (Kat Moran) is a vampire, as sexy as these new
wave vampires, but far creepier until enchanted she falls for Bottom, whose head has been turned into
that of a donkey, allowing Shakespeare all kinds of low wordplay involving the word "ass."
The play’s lovers, or at least the males, fall as well under this peculiar spell that has someone fall in
love with the first creature they spy upon waking.
This means that Demetrius (Corey DiNardo) who had so rudely scorned the plain Helena (Katy Schlegel) in
favor of Hermia (Brittany Pausch) and Lysander (Baxter Chambers), Hermia’s true love, both become
besotted with Helena.
Suddenly they pursue her, and she takes their attention as mockery.
Schlegel makes Helena sympathetic. She can come across as spiteful, but here her distress is palpable.
Pausch plays sweet as Hermia until thinking Helena has stolen Lysander’s heart she threatens to tear her
eyes out.
What fools, indeed, as Puck pronounces, these mortals be especially the rough mechanicals stumbling
toward staging a play for the nuptials of Theseus (Joel Paine) and the queen of the Amazons Hippolyta
(Danielle BonAnno).
Guion captures Quince’s comic ineptitude and Betancourt, who delivers a jolt of energy with every
entrance, is boisterous and self-assured as Bottom. Even with a donkey’s head, he takes the attentions
of Titania’s court as his due, though Jennifer Hojnacki, Lynette Cooley, Ashley Chapman and Kristen
Blaznik make apparent their distaste at having been ordered to fawn over him. His death scene in the
play within a play is hilarious, a precisely calibrated display of over-the-top melodramatics.
Meghan Koesters in heavy makeup plays Egeus, in this production, Hermia’s controlling grandmother, which
allows her to add bits of comic business into the role. Young Bob Walters has what may be called a
walk-on part except he’s riding on Billew’s shoulders as the Changeling, the pawn in the feud between
Oberon and Titania.
Flashing among these clusters of characters like bolts of heat lightning is Puck doing his mischief.
Friedberg’s Puck is rash, carefree, even careless, and caring little for any mistakes he makes. All the
better to instigate a bit of amusing chaos.
Amusing for Puck, certainly, and highly amusing for Shakespeare lovers on a summer’s night.