Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Ella Bromblin ©2025  

The space is simply designed with seating on three sides of a blue thrust stage cast in muted blue lighting with nothing but a curtain as a backdrop. The audience sits, casually chatting and removing their sweaters and scarves on a warming spring day in the village as the band warms up down stage left. The conversation and lights fide simultaneously as a group of men dressed in tailed tuxedos enter stage left singing in a barbershop quartet style, and as the ladies enter in simple evening gowns, Act I Scene I of A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins. It is the wedding of Duke Theseus (Chris Bolan) and Amazonian queen Hippolyta (Zoey Martinson.)

The characters immediately seem to initially interact in a space that has no audience—the actors operate in a 360-degree world that is staged so exquisitely the audience never seems to miss a beat. The classic story unfolds: Hermia (MacKenzie Meehan) refuses to marry her chosen husband, Demetrius, and elopes to wood with lover Lysander (David Keener). Meanwhile, Helena (Francesca Choy-Kee) is at her wit’s end in unrequited love with Demetrius and reveals the plan to him in an attempt to win his affection. Her plan fails, and she finds herself following Demetrius into the wood.

Ella Bromblin ©2025  

In the wood lie fairies and quarrelling King Oberon (doubled by Chris Bolan) and Queen Titania (doubled by Zoey Martinson) and Titania’s fairies. Here costume designer Kara Harmon begins to have fun and dresses her fairies in what looks to be 60s mod mismatched with scraps from the designs of a Project Runway reject: bright magentas, sea foam green, poppy and silver-laden girls dance about their royal highness in tights and sparkles. Here, the audience begins to stiffen in disappointment at the generalized choices of the actors—the fairies seem to just be your typical, archetypal fairies. There is nothing special, nothing absurd, nothing interesting about their choices. While Bolan harnesses the power of Oberon with presence and control, Martinson seems dwarfed as Titania and leaves the audience begging for the sassy, controlling queen we all know and love. And then there’s the infamous Puck (Jonathan David Martin), whose choices also to be a dime-a-dozen. The text is clear and the physicality strong, but the sense of mischief, of fun, of experimentation and darkness, is lost. As the play continues, the audience becomes disenchanted with the land of fairies and intrigued by the stories of the quarrelling lovers.

This is where director Davis McCallum and the ensemble succeed--in the honest deliverance of the text and telling of the story. No line is missed, no word scuttled over, no driving intention softened. The actors use their bodies, voices, and emotional inner-life to completely fill the space and the audience becomes completely invested in the story of the pairs of lovers. The choices are so clear, the actors, so committed, and the staging so spot-on that the audience members are on the edge of their seats, waiting to jump in and brawl as the lovers quarrel. There is also the brilliant team of players, headed expertly by Lee Dolson as Nick Bottom. Dolson brings everything the audience wants and more, and steals the show as the loveable, cocky, impassioned actor. The set is also geniusly contrived by Tom Gleeson: a curtain is pulled to reveal a bright backdrop with which to interact, four set pieces in the shapes of slices of pies are rearranged, opened up, and stacked upon one-another to change the landscape throughout.

Most importantly, the play is cohesive. The audience gets the story, and there is hardly a dull moment in the two hour and forty minute play. Ultimately, thanks to a picture-perfect directionand brilliant commitment to honesty the show is a complete success, so much that when Puck declares in his final monologue, “If we shadows have offended, think but this; and all is mended that you have but slumbered here while these visions did appear and this weak and idle theme no more yielding but a dream. Gentles--do not reprehend if you pardon, we will mend.” The audience finds itself, as one would after a beautiful midsummer night’s dream, enlivened with a renewed passion and vigor, and steps into the spring air with promise of the summer ahead.

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is presented by Tisch School of the Arts’ Third Year Graduate Acting Program in association with the Department of Design for Stage and Film at the Atlas Theatre, 111 2nd Ave. 3rd Floor April 20-25