GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicle

OCTOBER 28, 1994

Evenings Out

You must believe in fairies

A Midsumer Night's Dream

by William Shakespeare Charles Ludlam Theater New York City

Reviewed by Barry Daniels

If you can imagine a group of sexually precocious children putting on a production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, you will have a sense of the infectious innocence and sleazy silliness of Everett Quinton's Ridiculous Theatrical production of this classic comedy. Shakespeare's plot, a tangled web of love encompassing both the fairy and the human worlds, is a perfect vehicle for the happy sexual confusion that is the hallmark of the Ridiculous style. Quinton blends Shakespeare, television (Happy Days), and classic Greenwich Village camp in a production that could well prove once and for all that Shakespeare was one of us.

Costume designer Ramona Ponce has created an extravaganza that looks like a high school sock hop with a Greek theme supervised by a slightly desperate drag queen. She uses a mad assortment of curtain and upholstery fabric and yards of candy-colored tulle. Everything sparkles with the glamour of cheap jewelry and a heavy dusting of glitter. Props are a mix of nursery-hand puppets, dolls, and stuffed animals-and sex shop-whips, chains, leather gear, and assorted dildos.

The fairies in this Dream are straight from Christopher Street. Moth, Mustardseed, Cobweb and Pease-blossom are male ballerinas in tutus who flit athletically around the stage. Puck is a gorgeous boy with a great body, energetically played by Grant Neale. Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the fairies, are played as a same-sex couple. Eureka's Oberon is an imperious dyke in black leather with a crown of black dildos that drip dewy pearls at their tips. Beth Dodge Bass plays Titania as an aging nymphomaniac sporting huge pink sex-bomb breasts. There is a kind of queer gracefulness to the moment when these two women kiss and make up at the end of the play. In contrast, the mortal rulers are a parody of heterosexual coupling. Theseus (Tim Sozen) is a blustery warrior, and Hippolyta (Noelle Kalom), his queen, is an Amazon spitfire. She's chained and snarling when he drags her on stage at the beginning of the play. Marriage turns her into a bored and pouty doll.

The young lovers mirror the royal couples in their sexual variety. Jimmy Szczepanek plays Helena in a yellow flowered chintz gown and Helen of Troy blond wig. He's an unlucky-in-love drag queen desperately chasing after the pale-skinned ephebe Demetrius, played with charm by John Cassaras. Christine Weiss is a plump and spirited Hermia. She's the envy of us all possessing a Lysander like Wilfredo Medina, a Hispanic beauty with great tits. The climatic scene of these lovers confusion is a triumph of gay staging. When Demetrius and Lysander bare their chests and square

Grant Neale, I, and Eureka in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

off for a fight, the audience howls with laughter at the cute couple these two men make.

Quinton plays Hermia's father, Egeus, and Nich Bottom, the weaver and amateur actor who is turned into an ass as part of Oberon's revenge on Titania. Quinton's Bottom sports a Fonzie toupee. "Translated" he displays true comic genius in making a perfect ass of himself. The play within the play put on by Bottom and his "rude mechanical" friends reveals Shakespeare's kinship with the late Charles Ludlam. The actors tear its passions to a thriftshop tatters. Its pure Ri-

diculous Theatre at its very best.

There is a defiant quality about this Midsummer Night's Dream. At a moment when queer culture seems to be going mainstream, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company thumbs their noses at political correctness and the discourse of gender theory and take us back to a time when camp was a secret vice, savored with joyful and uninhibited pleasure. It's not surprising the straight press has not understood what was going on: this production is simply not for them. The production's

delight in hot young male bodies, samesex desire, and outrageous drag is perfectly queer. As director Quinton notes in the program, "in order for this production to work, you must believe in fairies."

A Midsummer Night's Dream is playing at the Charles Ludlam Theatre on Sheridan Square in New York's Greenwich Village. Performances are Tuesday through Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 7pm. Tickets are $25. For reservations telephone 212-691-2271.