A Midsummer Night's Dream

About the Production

The Allen Elizabethan Theatre at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is an open-air stage backed by the Oregon sky. Performing A Midsummer Night's Dream in that space creates a practical magic: the forest and the theater collapse into each other. As darkness fell each evening, the distinction between the lovers' enchanted wood and the real world beyond the stage became genuinely uncertain.

This production leaned into that uncertainty. The fairies were not prettified—they were strange, embodied, sometimes frightening. Puck's playfulness carried an edge of menace. Bottom's transformation was horrifying before it was funny.

Directorial Approach

The play's structure is itself a staging device: three worlds (court, forest, mechanicals) that interpenetrate and eventually merge. Our production tracked those worlds through movement vocabulary as much as through design. The court moved with Jacobean formality; the forest with improvised, animal physicality; the mechanicals with the particular earnestness of people who take their art seriously against all evidence.

The mechanicals' play-within-a-play was directed as a genuine tragedy—played straight, with all the pathos the mechanicals intend—before the comedy of the court's reaction arrived.

Creative Team

• Set Design: Tony Straiges
• Costume Design: Deborah M. Dryden
• Lighting Design: Jane Cox
• Titania/Hippolyta: Raquel Carrico
• Oberon/Theseus: Daniel José Molina
• Puck: Ámara James Okereke
• Bottom: G. Valmont Thomas