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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 03-SEP-07

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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

"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...

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