Vents MagaZine Music and Entertainment Magazine
Related Articles
The Ensemble Theater Company has done an excellent job staging their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Flea. The fledging company has gathered a group of actors with the skills and love of Shakespeare necessary, with the help of Dylan Diehl’s fine direction and creative vision, to put on an excellent production with necessary loyalty to the Bard’s wonderful language.
Truly outstanding was Chloe Champken’s Hippolyta. She knows enough about Shakespeare to understand that Hippolyta’s situation is not much different than Tamora’s in Titus Andronicus. She plays Hippolyta much like a less violent, but no less controlling Queen that we find in Shakespeare’s most violent play. We would love to see her play the Goth Queen as she can communicate control, approval or disapproval with the movement of her mouth or eyes. It’s not a major role in the production but Champken controls the stage whenever she is on it as Hippolyta.
Ella Olesen’s Puck packs the energy of a young child into each of her scenes. Trying to please her Master Oberon she nonetheless demonstrates the willfulness of a child whose impatience leads to mistakes that earn her Oberon’s wrath and the need to correct what she still doesn’t fully understand.
Diehl’s vision of having Hermia (Matisse Ratron-Neal), Helena (Gerrard Lobo), Lysander (Katie Pelensky) and Demetrius (Susannah Hoffman) played by actors who are of the opposite sex of what their names would indicate does not have the radical effect that she perhaps envisioned, but does show that you can cast Shakespeare without regard for gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity and lose nothing from the narrative. Men playing the female lovers as women and women playing male lovers as men only creates actors playing roles but does not introduce the “new” dynamic Diehl may have wanted.
Paul Marchegiani as Theseus demonstrates a combination and empathy and responsibility that most actors have trouble producing. That allows him to be the quiet center of the action whenever he’s on stage.
Celeste Moratti’s Bottom is a character who is an ass both before and after being transformed by Puck for Oberon’s revenge on Titania. The rest of the Mechanicals (Colleen Smith Wallanau – Quince, Jesse Cao Long – Flute, Joe Staton – Snug, Diego Milan – Snout, Dennis Kear – Starveling) all show the proper incompetence as an acting troupe in the Pyramus and Thisbe play where the nobles follow Demetrius’ lead despite know what they are watching is awful. Joe Staton does a solid job as Snug and Mustardseed as he moves in the corners of the stage and lets the audience know that he does not quite know what is going on with confusion caused by the other characters.
Overall, a fine production that is worth the trip downtown to Thomas Street to see.
-Bill Eisenring
