WHERE WERE THE FLYING DONKEYS?

Last Thursday some friends from CDI and I went to see a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Another member in our group, Little Rita, was in it, so we were anxious to see her perform.

I had seen productions of A Midsummer's Night Dream the last two years: one at the Williamstown Theater Festival in the summer of 2004, and one done by the Vienna Marionettes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just a few weeks ago. I wondered how this one would compare.

The publicity for the play promised "flying donkeys, bewildered lovers and warring fairies." The latter two are certainly in Shakespeare's script, but flying donkeys? All Shakespeare had was one person transformed into an ass, who remained quite firmly planted on the ground, as best as I can remember. And I'm pretty sure Shakespeare did not include an onstage oompah band either--though the audience was promised that also, plus a cast of 23. It all sounded like a whole lot of fun.

We cabbed up to the McGinn Cazale Theatre at 76th and Broadway, an ironic location for an off-off-Broadway production (do two "off"s make an "on"? Not in the theater). Off-off-Broadway shows must have fewer than 100 seats, and they don't have to follow various union rules--like the rule requiring the actors to be paid. We got there early, bought our tickets, and waited for them to allow us in to the seats. Come to think of it, we didn't get tickets, we just got programs.

After a bit a guy wearing a San Francisco Mime Troupe T-shirt opened the door and let us in, checking to make sure we all had programs. I hadn't heard anything of the San Francisco Mime Troupe since my college days. I guess they're still around.

We went in and claimed seats near the front of the stadium-seated theater. We looked at the set, with the advertised 5'X10' crash mat--a foam rubberish thing about 30" high like they use for high jumpers to land on. Up high on the right was a tiny area for the musicians, with an upright piano. I was very glad I had worn a thick sweater with an attached fuzzy scarf--the theater was very cold. It didn't warm up much as the rest of the audience arrived, maybe a couple dozen people. So the audience and the cast were about the same size.

The musicians (weirdly costumed) warmed up and tuned. Eventually the guy in the Mime Troupe t-shirt took the stage and did the cell phone announcement, and the play began. Things went from weird to weirder. They started with an extended battle with wooden weapons between Theseus and Hippolyta. Shakespeare's script was not exactly adhered to, but it was close--if anything the action was clearer.

The publicity promised a "lavender Lysander"--by which they meant lesbian. Lysander was played by a woman. I really wondered why they bothered. Outside of changing a pronoun here or there, everything was played straight--literally. It soon became clear that Lysander being a woman did not really change anything in the play.

When the fairies arrived things really got interesting. They jumped down and landed on the crash pad. One did back flips both off a wall and straight from the floor. He flew all over the place, doing a somersault in the air before bouncing off the crash pad.

There was more gender-bending when it came to the commoners who would be putting on "Pyramus and Thisby," the play-within-a-play done in honor of Theseus' and Hippolyta's wedding: four of the six were played by women--though not Flute, who would be Thisby, the female lead.

The play took its course, with one intermission. Things got very silly with the play-within-the-play. The woman playing Snout, did the part of the wall upside-down--she did a headstand, with Pyramus and Thisby conversing, etc. between her extremely long legs. And when they got to the line of Thisby's when she attempts to kiss Pyramus through the chink in the wall, and says "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all," looking down at Snout's crotch--well, you get the picture.

The whole thing was very enjoyable. The oompah band musical accompaniment was nice, adding just the right note of weirdness to the proceedings. The performances were very good--particularly Sara Moore's clownish Bottom (she's been in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus). She hammed it up perfectly--and got do a very realistic sex scene with Titania up in a hammock-thing, so only their heads and maybe their feet were visible. However, the hammock sure moved, so the audience knew very well what they were doing.

But even as an ass, Bottom did not fly. She did a little somersault off the hammock on to the pad just below, but I think that was it--certainly not the flying donkeys I was expecting. Oh, well.

It was all a lot of fun. Someone remarked that Shakespeare must be rolling over in his grave. I disagreed. Shakespeare wrote a comedy, to make people laugh, and he would probably be laughing to this production right along with the rest of us.

We waited in the lobby for Rita, and then we went down with her to get something to eat. She explained that we didn't get the full musical experience, because the flute and clarinet that are usually used were stolen since the previous performance. I had thought that the instrumentation was a bit weirder than it needed to be, but they covered the missing ones on the piano, I think--it wasn't bad.

We got some dinner at Nick's, a little place across Broadway that specializes in all sorts of hamburgers. I had an ostrichburger, with sweet potato fries. Yum.

But I still wish there had been flying donkeys.