Our sixth annual show in Woodside was Shakespeare's beloved comedy, full of young lovers, amateur actors and woodland fairies that play with them.
A Midsummer Night's Dream ends our sixth season as well and follows our last Theatre in the Woods production, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, which was of course inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was directed by Stuart Bousel and featured Molly Benson, Victor Carrion, Wylie Herman, Warden Lawlor, Carl Lucania, Spencer McCall, Jay Middleton, Allison Miller, Syri Mongiello, Karen Offereins, Jason Peelle, and Kari Wolman.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM ~ REVIEWS:

Palo Alto Almanac: "Plenty of fine actors, no fools in 'Dream' "

Palo Alto Daily News: "Audience takes 'Midsummer' romp in woods"

Play Shakespeare.com: "All the Wood's a Stage"

Poster Design and Publicity Photos courtesy of Gregorio De Masi.




From the Director: Legend has it that A Midsummer Night's Dream, one of the most popular plays Shakespeare was ever to pen, was first performed for a royal wedding, and that may explain why it retains such a sunny atmosphere, even despite more references to moonlight than any of the Bard's other works. The first of the "visionary" plays, Midsummer's sisterworks are the violent and apocolyptic Macbeth and the uncanny, disturbing Tempest. In all three plays Shakespeare creates a world where magic is real and powerful, and directly related to his characters' sense of their own interior reality, but while Macbeth is trapped in a world where his imagination is his worst enemy, and the magician hero of the Tempest, Prospero, is a powerful puppet-master unable to find inner peace despite his vast knowledge, Midsummer is a celebration of the innocent magic that manifests between young lovers discovering the best and worst sides of themselves, married couples learning to live harmoniously together, and country bumpkins attempting the high arts. It is, in other words, the magic of growth- of summer too old to be spring, but not yet moving into the autumn, when things are at the height of their bloom, or in human terms: those precious moments when we get to bask in the glory of our discoveries before plunging into the next journey. It is a play about how yearning, desire, passion, jealousy, despair and pride can all be transformed almost overnight, just as the play's young protagonists follow their turbulent hearts into the woods only to emerge wiser, calmer and more ready to move into the adulthood that stretches before them. It is about the endless possibility of all people and situations to change or be changed, and though its darker strains suggest that love might be nothing more than A Midsummer Night's Dream, and happy endings are just plain old luck, it also reminds us of the value of a good dream and the value of learning to celebrate our luck when it finds us.