Inspired ‘Midsummer’ twist would make The Bard cheer

• Reprints

Updated: March 18, 2012 8:07AM

Sex, love and role-playing. The id, the ego and the super-ego. And, beyond all else, the interpretation of dreams, with the many strange transformations that can come with them. Does all this bring anyone familiar to mind? That cigar-smoking godfather of psychoanalysis by the name of Sigmund Freud, perhaps?

Of course Shakespeare penned “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” centuries before Freud ever draped an oriental carpet over his fabled couch. But director Gary Griffin — whose inspired Chicago Shakespeare Theater production suggests this play is something far more than a romantic comedy about a volatile adult couple heading into marriage, two sets of immature lovers on the same path, a potion-bearing spirit and a group of amateur actors — has clearly seen the connection. And taking a fresh look at both the play’s text and its title (with an emphasis on the word “dream”), he has come up with a brilliant concept.

Why not set the play in Edwardian London, suggesting the Bloomsbury set (“royalty” of a high bohemian sort, and well known for their unorthodox sex lives), at the very moment that Freud was penning his theories in Vienna? This would enable him to give us a pan-gendered spirit, Puck, in the guise of Freud himself to serve as the sometimes careless dispenser of love potions. And suddenly everything in this all-too-frequently produced work could take on a whole new layer of “modernist” meaning without feeling the least bit forced. Magic.

Griffin, who can probably still hear the applause for his previous production of the season at Chicago Shakespeare — a rousing revival of Stephen Sondheim’s “Follies” — also figured out a simple but priceless way to get the play started. In doing so he has trumped Shakespeare himself simply by gently reordering a few scenes and emphasizing that we are about to witness a comedy, no matter how fanciful and complex. So the first characters we meet are now the simple tradesmen — a motley crew that might moonlight as a country band in a rural pub, and are about to try their hand at a little playacting. And only after the laughter they generate is set in motion do we see the father who tries to compel his daughter to marry a young man she doesn’t love, or the sharp pre-marital spat between the older pair who clearly have some power issues to resolve before they tie the knot.

Of course in the dream world, they all become disoriented “fairy spirit” versions of their real selves. And even that element makes total sense here as the Edwardian era was awash in “faerie lore.”

You could not dream of more ideal casting for the dual roles of Theseus and his wife-to-be, Hippolyta (who become Oberon and Titania in “Fairyland”) than Timothy Edward Kane, that coolly seductive master of the poetic and sardonic, and the supremely sexy Tracy Michelle Arnold, whose voice could give Maggie Smith a good run for her money.

Elizabeth Ledo, her head bravely shaved bare, and her sexual duality a sort of Freudian nutshell of meaning, is a pure powerball Puck in a production full of physical, as well as verbal energy.

Ron Orbach is a delight as Nick Bottom, the weaver and enthusiast who finds his inner theatrical ham, with Tim Kazurinsky spot-on as the nervous carpenter-turned-producer, Levenix Riddle a comic charmer as Bottom’s genteel southern black lady love, and Michael Aaron Lindner, Rod Thomas and Richard Manera as their fellow tradesmen (or “mechanicals”). Griffin has also ingeniously turned their play into a little musical, with a beguiling country music “score” by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen, and delicious vocal harmonizing courtesy of the actors.

Playing the young lovers are Laura Huizenga (as a feisty, if initially unrequited Helena); Christina Nieves (as Hermia), Matt Schwader (Demetrius) and Andy Truschinski (Lysander).

Daniel Ostling’s set and Mike Tutaj’s projection design are a seamless pairing. But it is Mara Blumenfeld’s costumes that make Griffin’s Freudian frolic fly — from the elegantly shaped Edwardian classics, to the hint of British Empire exoticism for Oberon and Titania, to the striped pajamas and elaborately botanical headpieces for the dreamland fairies. Their vegetal crowns could easily be boxed up at the end of the “Midsummer” run and shipped off to Paris for next spring’s couture collections. Meanwhile, they’re the top.