Greek to Me.(A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iphigenia 2.0)(Theater review)

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" (a Public Theatre production, at the Delacorte, under the direction of Daniel Sullivan) is a sort of burlesque without the nudity, a celebration of the vulgarity endemic to show business and of the performer's need to show off. (The late Gypsy Rose Lee would have made a sensational Titania, Queen of the Fairies, resplendent in pasties and a crown.) One of Shakespeare's first major comedies, "A Midsummer Night's Dream" is a fast locomotive, piled high with supple young bodies and wit, a farce about the lengths to which we will go in order to be seen and held by others who may not want to see or hold us.

The play's one constant is nature. The moonlight is clear and bright, compared with "Midsummer'' 's alternately besotted and hysterical lovers, for whom the moon and the stars are little more than handy metaphors for their all-too-human self-interest. Even as, compelled by the forces of nature and magic, Demetrius (Elliot Villar) chases Hermia (the lovely-voiced Mireille Enos), and Lysander (Austin Lysy) falls in love with Helena (the astonishing Martha Plimpton), the temporarily mismatched lovers either ignore or express their irritation with the elements that house them. These four and the other members of the menage end up outdoors on the slightest pretext: Hermia's father, Egeus (George Morfogen), disapproves of his daughter's wish to marry sweet, earnest Lysander, so they flee Athens. Meanwhile, Helena, a friend of Hermia's, is pursuing Demetrius, who is the kind of romantic who refuses to settle for anything less than the purest love.

Helena, on the other hand, is nature, a whirlwind who longs to share the pleasures of her flesh, even though the more civilized--which is to say, more repressed--members of her troupe repel her advances. As played by Plimpton--who, in the past few seasons, has given indelible performances in plays ranging from Conor McPherson's "Shining City" to Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia"--Helena is a spectacle unto herself, full-blooded and alive. Plimpton's physical and verbal pyrotechnics, it turns out, are precisely what's missing from the fairies who populate the play's usually thrilling alternate universe.

Watching Jon Michael Hill play Puck, you pose a number of questions: Why is the diminutive actor dressed to resemble a bat (in a way that evokes Ben Vereen in "Pippin")? And why, when he communicates with the First Fairy (Chelsea Bacon), does he remind you of the choreographer Bob Fosse's marvellously odious gyrations as the Snake in the 1974 film of "The Little Prince"? It's as if Sullivan--a busy but undistinguished director--had decided to leave everything up to Shakespeare's dialogue and refrained from actually directing the characters who inhabit "Midsummer" 's spirit world. Dressed badly, by Ann Hould-Ward, and sporting even worse makeup (Keith David's partly silver face, as he plays Oberon, reminds one of the mask from "The Phantom of the Opera"), Sullivan's fairies look like escapees from an Edward Gorey ...