‘MIDSUMMER NIGHT’: DAZE-DREAMING

Some shows are shows-and-a-half, some are half-shows.

In a midsummer ripe with productions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the San Diego Rep has come up with one that’s cut the play to shreds/ribbons/confetti (depending on your point of view), garlanded it with a loose jazz score by Max Roach and spoofed it within an inch of its logic.

The result is a laid-back, semi-amiable shambles, rife with contradictions and set to San Diego beach time. It’s too inconsequential to provoke much anger in this corner, but it’s also undisciplined and undefined, which kills the fun.

For all of Roach’s reputation as a major jazz figure, he seems here to have let the music rip without much unifying sense. The result is a rudderless, floating score that bobs pleasantly along, moved by the moon and the tides. Forget navigational charts. There are none--and no anchor in any port, except for a pair of songs that offer a promise they never quite fulfill: Puck’s “Up and Down” and Bottom’s “Why Do They Run?” (The titles are my own; the program, true to the freewheeling nature of the music, lists no songs.)

The staging by George Ferencz only reinforces this affection for the haphazard. A brief program note by Ferencz begins and ends with the statement “Improvisation is the key in creating art.” Art maybe; jazz maybe; theater hardly.

“In this production,” he also writes, “we are bringing improvisation to the performance of a classic.” Yes, and it shows. There is an absence of precision and a general arbitrariness that undermine even some of the staging’s few interesting ideas.

To say this production is loosely based on Shakespeare is to say a lot. Virtually half the script is missing. Slashed. Gone. And with it went the poetry, the magic and the cadence--three principal reasons for doing this play. Anyone unfamiliar with its plot would have a hard time figuring out who was doing what to whom and why--especially the rustics who suddenly appear, rehearse their little play and finally perform it, all without explanation (and without nearly enough humor). Musical spine or no, this is the most un lyrical “Midsummer” in memory.

Assuming this was part of the plan (a tough, hip “Midsummer”? Why not? Stranger things have happened), it does not explain some of its curiosities.

Why, for instance, do the lovers face the audience when they are ostensibly talking to each other? And why do we have Oberon and Titania doubling as Hippolyta and Theseus, respectively? Keith David and Sheila Dabney as the fairy king and queen are two of the better things in this production; but having the Eartha Kittenish Dabney play Theseus as a diminutive Haile Selassie in khakhis, and the six-foot David portray Hyppolita as a monstrous Geisha in whiteface, are easily two of the worst. The joke, if it is one, is good for about a minute.

Most of the better gags in this “Midsummer” are sight gags. A grinning, gum-chewing Lysander (Jim Morlino thoroughly winning in paint-spackled jump suit) seems to be waiting only for the surf to rise. An Ollie North-type naval officer of a Demetrius (Joe Kane) develops a deliciously belated sense of humor.

A Valley-girlish Hermia (Beverly Bremers) comes up with more spunk than she seemed capable of mustering at first. And the distraught Helena, nicely performed by a loping Natasha Kautsky in red sneakers, silver ear-loops, a man’s shirt and slacks torn at the knees walks off with some of the evening’s choicest moments.

The production’s conceptual coup is undoubtedly Ronn K. Smith’s strutting, drug-pushing Puck, in corn rows and head-to-toe black leather, dispensing the “stuff” at Oberon’s behest. (Sally Lesser dreamed up the costumes.)

The rustics, though, are a diminished and sorry lot, their scenes so radically cut that they’re more an intrusion into than an active part of the story. Once we get over the minor fun of seeing Bottom (Damon Bryant) as a U.S. Mail carrier, and watching Peter Quince (Frederick Edmund) don the manner and look of a TV host for the performance at the end, their scenes are fairly bankrupt.

Dragging someone up from the audience to roar as the lion is a superannuated device that doesn’t work. Overly present, overly cute, overly uninterested children don’t either. And the novelty of having the quarreling lovers dunk and splash one another in an on-stage Jacuzzi may dredge up oohs and aahs (and there were plenty of those opening night), but it’s the ultimate trivializing--not to say trashing--of the play.

The fundamental problem rests with the Ferencz choices. In adopting an anything-goes improvisational approach to emulate the jazz, he’s gone after flash and gimmicks and externals at the expense of internal resonance. It’s a good idea gone awry, ironically supplanting rather than enhancing the playwright’s deeper harmonies. There is music and then there is music.

Performances at 79 Horton Plaza run Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. No shows Sept. 6. Ends Sept. 13. Tickets: $15-$18; (619) 235-8025).