STAGE REVIEW : SCR ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ Is a Multi-Ethnic Nightmare

For reasons no one has particularly clarified, the Southland is in a midwinter grip of long nights’ journeys into “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” First at the Mark Taper Forum, where the Renaissance Theatre Company closes its production Sunday--and now at South Coast Repertory, where the “Dream” opened Thursday under the direction of Paul Marcus.

Why and why now? Is it that winter is the only fitting climate for such tainted visions of the “Dream”? Is it that school is in session and that the South Coast “Dream” is part of that theater’s Classic Discovery program? There’s not much point in speculating, but one thing there can be no doubt about is that this latest version is another nightmare.

It must be sheer coincidence, it has to be, but the sense of deja-vu is overwhelming. This “Dream” is if not a twin at least a sibling to the one at the Taper, and one of those in one year is enough.

Let’s be clear. What infects and despoils this “Dream” is not the setting (a sort of intentionally disheveled Early Nowhere/Everywhere, designed by Cliff Faulkner but desired by director Marcus) or the pastiche of international, interperiod costumes (created by the excellent Shigeru Yaji in his most regal mode) or the dark reading of the play’s spirit world. It is actors who can’t speak the language and a director who insists on superimposing arbitrary ideas on a perfectly clear and driven text.

Let’s be clearer. There is nothing wrong with the stern, bleak images that greet us in the play’s opening scenes. Paulie Jenkins’ splashes of hot light (in the hallway), contrasting with the cool moonlight streaming in the almost empty room where Hippolyta (Gina Spellman) has escaped from an unfriendly court, create a lustrous element of mystery and intrigue.

Why the furniture is overturned and the room so bare is another muddy matter (and unlikely in so rigid a court), but let’s forgive the effect, which, of all things, has a certain Hogarthian flair. The trouble begins when Theseus (Tony Fields) opens his mouth. Fields has physical grace and good looks, but his iambic pentameter is all flab.

With the exception of the “rude mechanicals” (entirely composed, it turns out, of actors from that solid-gold nucleus of SCR veterans), it’s all downhill from there.

Fields and Spellman also play Oberon and Titania and, while Spellman manages the words reasonably well, Sterling Macer Jr. is thoroughly stumped by them as Puck. It doesn’t help that, because he’s black (this is a multiracial cast), Marcus has him deliver some of his speeches in rap. Surely this is the production’s worst idea.

Well, one of them. Why they all inhabit a kingdom of goblins that look more like the witches in “Macbeth” than creatures with such diaphanous names as Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb and Mustardseed is another good question. There are plenty of production precedents for a negative spirit world in “Dream,” but it has to have blood in its veins.

The creatures here are bad imitations of real perniciousness. A true sense of menace, brutality or seductive eroticism (take your pick) is simply not there.

But where the play truly falls down is with the young lovers. Hermia (Lori Michael), Helena (Bridget Connors), Lysander (Steven Flynn) and Demetrius (Jim Pirri) are pretty but out of their depth. Their line readings make sense (except when Lysander says he wants to perish on his sword and there is no sword), but their voices strain, their words are frequently mush (the women’s more than the men’s) and the physical comedy is convoluted and cute instead of spontaneously fickle and funny. All effort, no joy.

This leaves us with the “mechanicals,” who more or less save the day and not by default, either.

Robert Sicular is the vainest Bottom we’ve been treated to in some time and Hal Landon Jr. as Quince keeps us in stitches with his deliciously unruly crew (John Ellington, John David Keller, Art Koustik and Don Took). If Marcus had only cast the rest of this show with actors like these, things would have been a lot less enervating.

The classics can and should be contemporized as long as there is an investment of good sense that keeps us connected to them. A note on this “Dream” claims that the director’s objective was “to avoid tethering the audience’s imagination in any way.” But the most tyrannical tether is a production that keeps you wondering why it does what it does.

Ill met by moonlight.

At 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa, Tuesdays through Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7:30 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2:30 p.m. Ends April 5. Tickets: $21-$28; (714) 957-4033).