Will Kempe’s Players have returned full-throttle!  Their 2019 season opened with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, most appropriately on the eve of the solstice. While previous engagements prevented me from attending opening night, I made it to their Sunday show. I’ve been eagerly anticipating their return and believe me, they did not disappoint!

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     While some faces among the cast were familiar and others I’d glimpsed at their auditions in February and hoped to see in this show were absent entirely, there were many fresh new ones this season and that excites me. Seeing that so many new people had taken interest and gained opportunity to share in the amazing process that is Original Practices Shakespeare was encouraging.  I took great pleasure witnessing the talent displayed by these newcomers. Kristoph DiMaria did a superb job in his directorial debut and I would also like to give major props to Sandy Boynton, Savannah Blum and Shae Fitzgerald for the stunning costumes created for this show. Puck was especially amazing!

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     A Midsummer Night’s Dream has always been among my favorite of Shakespeare’s works. Eloping lovers, unrequited emotions, hidden faerie kingdoms, delightfully fiendish pranks and the players playing players playing a play within the play (have fun with that one)—what is there to not enjoy?

     Ahhh, Athens in the summer, the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, birds are singing…and disobedient daughters are put to death for the foolish mistake of having hearts of their own. You know, ‘cause that’s fair. Don’t you just love archaic laws?

     Fair Hermia, is so enamored with her doting Lysander, you’d think they would be a perfect match but daddy says no, no, no, silly girl, you must marry Demetrius because that’s what I  want you to do. And oh, by the way: if you don’t obey my command you can either die or become a nun, and he’ll implore Thesius, the Duke of Athens, to be sure things go his way. So what’s a self-respecting couple in love to do? Why elope, of course!

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     Poor Helena is Hermia’s best friend and sick with hopeless devotion to Demetrius. She worships the very ground he walks and would happily accept a daily kick to the face from him if it meant that he noticed her. Alas, alack though: in his eyes she is second-rate. (Raise your hand if you’ve been THERE before!) She gets the grand notion that spilling the beans about Hermia’s pending elopement with Lysander will somehow make Demetrius more gracious toward her but is rewarded only with continuing to chase after him as he pursues the lovers into the woods. None of them know what they are about to encounter.

     Oberon, the jilted faerie king is miffed with his queen Titania for not giving up a favored changeling to him. So he devises a plan to trick her into giving him up. Employing the aid of his minion Puck, he instructs that a flower from Cupid be procured that will be placed upon Titania’s eyes, the end result in mind being that she will fall madly in love with the first person she sees.

   My eyebrows were literally raised by the wonderfully-executed displays of sleight of hand in these scenes on the part of Oberon. A flower goes from white to purple, and later the flower goes from plant to potion in a vial and the transition is seamless! Bravo!

     However, Oberon happened to notice Helena’s fruitless plight as she followed Demetrius into the forest and he tells Puck to anoint “the Athenian’s eyes” with the potion as well with the intent that Demetrius will see Helena and fall as in love with her as she is with him, thereby bringing her hapless heartsickness to a happy conclusion. Here is where the real fun begins!