A Midsummer Night's Dream
Quintessence Theater
7137 Germantown Ave.
Philadelphia
Seen March 6, 2025
Showing through April 26, 2025
At the start of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, protagonist Lysander tells his beloved: “The course of true love never did go smooth.”
That line foreshadowed the fallout of Quintessence Theatre’s own production of Shakespeare’s craziest works of comedy. The show’s opening night stuttered in execution, but still beguiled its audience through its live retelling of a centuries-old story, demonstrating theater’s ability to make light of even the heaviest human heartaches.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a meta script containing a play within a play. It’s a timely follow-up by Quintessence to its recent staging of Kiss Me Kate, another piece of embedded narrative that I wrote about as a testament to the permanent resonance of theater as an artistic medium.
Virtually every time I see a show at Quintessence Theatre — and I patronize their playhouse on the regular — I leave drunk on the night. I usually feel called to shout, “Brava!” and whip my scarf around me in a flash of opulence after the curtain goes down. One time I handed out candy to the actors after their performance. As a classical repertory theater, Quintessence provides theater kids like me a chance to see old work come alive without skimping on the flamboyant sense of fun that’s long made the stage a special source of entertainment.
That said, Alex Burns’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream brought out a cattier queen who lives inside of me.
The plot is uniquely absurd and hard to follow, even for Shakespeare. The story follows the chase of lovers, requited or otherwise, through the woods as a fairy kingdom meddles in their affairs. The plot is meandering: Just when you think everyone is set to live happily ever after, you’re thrust into a play within a play, and lurched back into opening scenes. Over time, we watch three subplots develop: A series of arguments between Athenian lovers, the rehearsals of six actors preparing a terrible play, and the back and forth of the fairies.
The deliberately bad acting of the meta performance was the best part. There’s a character named Bottom who refuses to accept his role assignment, loudly bragging about how well he could play every part of the show. His overconfident delivery cracked up the audience.
Unfortunately, the more serious lines of Shakespeare were subject to stutters. The king of the fairy Kingdom — Oberon — seemed to draw out the last syllables of his lines, adding a strange inflection that made it difficult to connect to the historic text he was speaking.
It quickly became clear that the star didn’t know his lines. I realized this when I noticed Oberon’s eyes darting across a prop labeled “Book of Spells,” that I’m certain was the script in disguise.
In contrast, Oberon’s comedic henchman — Puck — was putting on the show of a lifetime. At every turn, Puck was on their knees, back, or belly, tongue lolling out of their mouth. Puck’s feverish display of mischief was the antithesis of Oberon’s dry and halting delivery.
The stalling became more and more apparent in the second act. Hippolyta, played by the same actor who performed as Oberon, delivered a few final remarks prior to the staging of the show-within-a-show. Their monologue came to a harsh stop as they repeated their last two words in an ostensible attempt to jog their own memory. After a pregnant pause, a new scene was born; Hippolyta’s scene partner skipped ahead to the next cue. Just when I started to get anxious at the thought of how far off the rails something could go, the players provided some much-needed relief.
Anything that could have gone wrong within the meta-play did. Masks slipped off actors’ faces as they breathed loudly through their costume’s eye holes. The players intentionally but convincingly fumbled and forgot their lines, opted in and out of accent choices, and scenes became gratuitously sexual at a moment’s notice. Instead of waiting with baited breath for more mistakes, I was laughing easily along with the audience again.
The bad play is what put us back in good humor. I no longer felt let down by the lost lines; I was instead enchanted once again by Quintessence’s resolve to make an old show come alive.
The experience was anything but smooth. Still, it executed Shakespeare’s point about the purpose of play with a lot of modern love and laughter. The epilogue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream gets this whole idea across:
“If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but slumbered here, / While these visions did appear; / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream.”
