A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
Picture Michael Maggio’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a miniature golf course. Not just any miniature golf course: a really cool miniature golf course, like the one in the mall on North Clybourn, where each hole’s designed by an artist and you find yourself putting around skeleton bones or across rooftops. A bright, hip, postmodern parody of a miniature golf course that kids the game even as it invites you to play it.
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Not that he’s completely harmless. In the first scene of the play, Theseus, the duke of Athens, speaks tenderly to his fiancee, Hippolyta, telling her how awfully glad he’ll be when four days have passed and they can be wed. Hippolyta assures him the days will fly by. I’ve never seen this exchange offered as anything other than an expression of shared bliss. Maggio, however, places it in a sleek executive office and plays it like a corporate merger. Theseus’ people whisper like diplomats; Hippolyta’s file in wearing power suits. The emphasis is clearly not on the duke’s endearments, but on the realpolitik implied in his comment to Hippolyta that “I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries.”
Magic City is pure miniature golf, full of fantastic and arbitrary conceits. The arbitrariness is something of a drag initially: especially after the clear focus of that first, feminist scene, it feels debilitating to be inundated with images bearing no apparent relationship either with what seemed to be the theme or with each other. I was put off for a while by the show’s strident whimsy.
