REVIEW : Bard’s ‘Dream’ Comes True in Union Hall

In Elizabethan days, Shakespearean companies played in marketplaces and town squares, so it seems only natural that the Bard should materialize in a union hall--specifically, the Union Labor Temple, a historical red brick building on the edge of Old Town Pasadena.

The Los Angeles Shakespeare Company (not to be confused with the better known Shakespeare Festival/LA) has returned to Pasadena after a year’s absence with a dreamy, moonlit production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

The group, which has been based in Woodland Hills, is looking to form a permanent home at the Union Labor Temple. And the marriage between a union hall and the rude, blue-collar mechanicals in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” seem made for each other.

More than that, the old hall, for years the scene of raucous union meetings, has been turned into an agreeable theater by LASC artistic director Geoffrey G. Forward. The acoustics in the high ceilinged venue are excellent, the tiered seats provide fine sight lines, and the performance space is expansive enough to accommodate all the sets of lovers, clowns and fairies who romp through this most frequently produced of Shakespeare’s plays.

Forward has big plans for his company. An Actors Equity 99- seat agreement theater, the company is also in residence at The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, (where it holds workshops each Saturday morning near the lily ponds).

Some of that botanical atmosphere must have rubbed off on the troupe, because its rendering of the magical forest and woods in “Midsummer” is flavorfully conjured by the show’s resourceful technical talent: the overhanging drapery of a dark, green glen by set designers Carl Pfeifer and Brent Altomare; the inventive and sublime contemporary wardrobe by costume designer Tally Briggs; and the aura of moon and night distilled by lighting designers Jason Kai Cooper and Lesli Bjork.

A curious and revealing footnote: This play refers to moon more than all of Shakespeare’s other plays combined.

A good production, as this one generally is, must capture that moonlit world of dreams, shadows and mirthful nightmare to which the mortal young lovers Lysander/Hermia and Demetrius/Helena are transported under the fairy dust sprinkled by those sprites Puck (the athletic Jeffrey Paul Whitman, incongruously dressed like an Apache Indian) and Oberon (the vigorous, spirited Carl Pfeifer, the aforementioned set designer, whose forceful diction rings with bell-like clarity).

Eric Liddell, an actor making his directorial debut here, is wonderful in double duty, playing the bemused, noble duke Theseus. And his staging of the mood swings between the fairyland and the real world of aristocratic Athens is deft and even brisk.

But Liddell doesn’t always keep a tight rein on his cast’s phrasing. Some of the actors (notably the women) swallow their words and speak too fast so that the poetry is muffled and a few lack stage presence (notably the rude mechanicals who stage a buffoonish play within the play).

The overripe exception among the working class fools is the self-deceiving clown played by the bumptious Blaise Messinger, who energizes the colorful Bottom (he of the famous ass’s head).

The two sets of lovers, deliciously dressed in shades of off-white, are perfectly cast. The Lotharios Lysander and Demetrius (the handsome and well-spoken Rajan Dosaj and Kurt Ehrmann) are as interchangeable as they were intended to be. And their swooning princesses, Hermia and Helena, are Goldilocked in their lacy, white gowns (the rebellious, dark KeiRowan-Young and the tall, copper-haired, absolutely luminous Zoe Benston). These lovers are playful, sexy and infectious.

So, too, are Fairy King Oberon and his Fairy Queen Titania (played by costume designer Tally Briggs, sprinkled with stardust in her leafy bower.) As for Titania’s kingdom of little fairies, they are performed nicely by juvenile actors who glide about in charmingly funky costumes.

Puck might declare “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” but mortality in this play is only half the story. The rest is the symmetry of dreams and the half-sleep of “lunatics, madmen and poets,” as the imperial duke pragmatically rails at his new bride Hippolyta (Jane Longenecker), who understands better than he the power of imagination.

‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’

Union Labor Temple, 42 E. Walnut Ave. (at Raymond), Pasadena, Friday-Saturday, 7:30 p.m. Ends June 26. $10-$20. (818) 989-7221. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes.