Globe For All Brings a "Dream" to Life

Nine talented young performers in the Old Globe Theatre’s touring arm, Globe For All, took on 21 roles in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and delivered non-stop, rollicking uproar in the round, before an appreciative audience, in Alvarez Auditorium, Lemon Grove Academy, on Nov. 14.

The free show, preceded by a tasty free dinner in the patio beside the auditorium, and the free workshop about the play held a week earlier, are central to the Globe’s long term effort to build audiences in under-served communities. In Lemon Grove, where many residents live paycheck-to-paycheck and cannot afford tickets to major cultural events, the welcome to Globe For All has been ecstatic since 2016.

The Lemon Grove Historical Society, Lemon Grove Library and Lemon Grove School District collaborate to bring the Globe productions to town in spring and winter each year.

Shakespeare’s fondness for mistaken identity, gender confusion, class differences, and the use of outdoor settings like forests to free his characters from social constraints reaches new heights of hilarity in “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Fairies, led by feuding royalty Oberon and Titania, contrast with Athenian leader Theseus and fiancée Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons. The fairy couple arrive on the shoulders of acolytes, while the Athenians are preceded by paparazzi with Iphones, both touches among many clever innovations by director Patricia McGregor.

Two loving couples doused with a magic potion given by Oberon to his servant, Puck, reverse their affections and chase each other through the forest. Titania gets the same treatment and falls for a donkey. The donkey is actually Bottom, a “mechanical,” or skilled laborer, and would-be star. Things get wilder and wilder.

The mechanicals (in green T-shirts) stage the famous conclusion to the play, the hysterically funny “Tragedie of Pyramus and Thisbe,” for the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. For this, Shakespeare was one of a long line of writers, right up to the producers of “The Simpsons,” to satirize these characters from Greek mythology — reducing the Lemon Grove audience to paroxysms of mirth into the bargain.

Appalled by the mess his potion created, and by the sight of beauteous Titania mooning over a donkey, Oberon reverses the effects and sets everyone to rights. Along the way we learn something about the accessibility of Shakespeare, the universality of humor, and, as McGregor notes, “experience the genius of the work when we take down the mantle of reverence and enjoy it like the hottest concert in town.”

To attend future performances, and for news about other cultural events, keep in touch with the Lemon Grove Historical Society at www.lghistorical.org.