WALKING ON A DREAM
On Tuesday night, The Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theatre received a standing ovation for a Midsummer’s Night Dream. Well deserved, in my opinion. It was as if the audience was sprinkled with fairy dust and transported to a dreamscape.
Director Shira Dubrovner’s touch made the play both tangible and compelling. She set the play in the 1800s, emulating Bridgerton. Although not contemporary, this placed the play in a culturally relevant context, somewhere the audience could relate to and understand. The soundtrack and many of the costumes further mirrored the popular Netflix TV series. For her fairies, Dubrovner added another twist, drawing inspiration from Mad Max.
“I was just thinking of Tina Turner’s hair,” she said in an interview with The Sheet, in reference to her rendering of the character Puck.
Dubrovner’s twists reached further than the setting and costumes. She added numerous dance numbers that the fairies took part in, like their mid-show rendition of Sweet Dreams. She switched the roles between Oberon (Jesse Steele) and Tatania (Kaytee Long Becker). This created a plot point in which the fairy king, not the fairy queen, fell in love with Nick Bottom the bewitched donkey (Maurice Cooper). Steele and Cooper’s chemistry made the audience howl with laughter. It made me think of how these scenes were in Shakespeare’s time, when all the actors were men. I imagined stinky British men with rotting teeth in the 1600s. Gender play? Never not funny.
Directing Midsummer was an intense labor of love, Dubrovner explained. At the Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theatre, which she founded in 2009, there are no costume designers and no stage managers. Dubrovner sat through every hour of rehearsal. She hand built the sets. She hand painted each fairy costume.
“It takes hundreds and hundreds of hours,” Dubrovner said. But, she said, the process is worth it. “What’s really wonderful is taking this concept, planting that seed, and seeing it blossom and grow. It’s kind of addictive.”
The cast behind Dubrovner’s directing truly made this iteration of Midsummer Night’s Dream come alive. I couldn’t stop laughing at Cooper’s donkey impression and Belaunzaran’s lion roar. I was delighted by Puck’s (Elaine Mirelle’s) sinister weirdness, her flexibility, her darting tongue. I felt for Helena (Kelly Rose McCann) as she pined for Demetrius (Skyler Kenny). And I grieved for Heremia (Tyler McManus) when Lysander (Micheal Neal Johnson) suddenly stopped loving her.
“The talent pool is so big,” Cooper said in an interview with The Sheet. The cast included actors with all different levels of experience, each who had a different tie to the community.
“It’s probably one of the coolest ways to meet people in Mammoth,” Cooper continued. He’s been acting in Mammoth since 2015. He says this is where he’s worked with the most talented people.
McCann elaborated on the joys of community theater. She studied theater in college, but this was her first show on the Mammoth stage. She stated that when theater no longer was the focus of everyone’s lives, it became much more fun.
“We were doing this for the love of it,” she said. “It was just really enjoyable, because everybody wanted to be there really badly.”
One member of the cast, Johnson, made the trek from LA to play Lysander. He was filling a role that has been left empty at the last minute. He’d never been to Mammoth prior to joining the play, but he said he was welcomed with open arms.
“The energy and the vibe of everybody just working together to put on this show for neighbors and friends has been such a heartwarming and positive experience for me,” Johnson said.
Dubrovner hopes that the Mammoth Shakespeare festival will ultimately draw people from far and near. “The goal is to make it into a staple of the summer,” she said.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an inherently absurd story. Yet its themes––the flippancy of love, the selfishness of man and fairies alike––continue to ring true.
“These stories share a type of communal catharsis,” Johnson said.
I asked him what he meant. He defined communal catharsis as the feeling of experiencing love and tragedy and joy alongside the people who constitute our society.
After we spoke, I reflected on this idea. Maybe the shared experience of watching the play not only transported the audience, but it connected us. Maybe, that’s the beauty of community theatre. It celebrates what makes us innately human.
