The Chattanooga Theatre Centre combines fantastical farce and disco
If you’re sitting here eatin’ your heart out, baby, waiting for some lover to call, perhaps instead you should shake your groove thing down to the Chattanooga Theatre Centre for “A Midsummer Night’s Disco,” now playing through June 18. It’s a chance to get on up with the Bard while attesting how deep is your love for the Bee Gees. Just be forewarned: There will be fairies.
As you’ll recall from Mr. Bettelheim’s eighth-grade English class, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” mixes and matches three sets of lovers: the country-club set, led by Theseus and Hippolyta; the forest-rampaging fairies, headed by Oberon and Titania; and the young lovers, Helena and Hermia and their testosterone-addled beaux, Lysander and Demetrius. Comic and romantic chaos ensues from the magical meddling of Puck, a mischief-making fairy who puts the “imp” in poor impulse control.
It’s a potent combination—the Dream play and the disco scene—as co-directors Scott Dunlap and Beth Gumnick have taken apart the well-loved story and restructured it anew, literally constructing a disco club dance floor in the circle theatre space.
“The club is like the forest in the play, where all the rules are off,” Dunlap says. The parallels to the 1970’s disco scene become clear as he elaborates: “You take drugs, wake up the next day, and fall in love with the first person you see.” Several of the lovers do exactly that in the Shakespeare’s play, most notably the comical blowhard Bottom, who is transformed into a donkey-headed avatar of himself.
The experience starts in the lobby. Theatergoers are led through the back hallways of the CTC, which have been decorated as a city alleyway to suggest clandestine entry to a sketchy urban club. Making the scene is a groovy trip. Seemingly all the disco balls, flashing colored lights, and fog machines in the tristate region have been pressed into service (possibly excepting the ones in your rec room).
Innumerable colored wigs, stacked heels, crazy-colored pairs of shades, and too-short athletic shorts have been rescued from the Repository of Regrettable Clothing. The stage is set with more purple and orange than a Fanta machine—raised circular platforms for shuckin’ and jivin’ (no better term has been coined); orange-shag-carpeted “bowers” for the fairies and lovers to luxuriate on; electric-lighted palm trees, and signs with those awful curvy and inline typefaces that were last seen spelling out Studio 54, Saturday Night Fever, or the ever-in-fashion Peace and Love.
“We see it as more of a party scene than a play,” says Gumnick. “You can get up and dance or you can sit in the corner and watch like a voyeur.” However, take note: bewigged young men wearing tube socks, short shorts, and no tops—well, actually, fairy wings on top—will be flying all about the place.
The club’s denizens will be dancing in the aisles. Some good-natured audience couple each night will be selected to perform as Hippolyta, the smokin’ hot fiancée, and Theseus, her horndog old man who’s ready to jump her bones before the nuptials commence. Can you dig it?
The music of the era is, inevitably, right on. “Love Hangover” is a perfect choice for the awakening of the be-druggled young lovers. Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff,” and the Bee Gees’ “More Than a Woman” have tidy thematic tie-ins, but to say more would give away nice surprises.
“Macho Man” plays to introduce the Rude Mechanicals, a group of working class stiffs (“hard-handed men” in the original play) who are gender liberated in this cast. “It’s a great opportunity for women to play these roles, the Mechanicals and Oberon as well, which are usually reserved for men,” says Gumnick. “It’s interesting that it’s the opposite of what was done in Shakespeare’s day, when all the actors were male.”
And it does get interesting. King of the Fairies Oberon, often depicted in other productions in wild androgynous makeup, is here played by a woman (“a drag king, mysterious and fun,” in Dunlap’s words), who hooks up his wife, the Fairy Queen Titania, with Bottom, a male character here played by a woman, who spends an important part of the story ensorcelled and embowered with the queen while wearing a see-through donkey head.
It’s certainly not 50 Shades of Shakespeare, but perhaps such stuff as dreams are made on.
If it’s your thing, do what you want to do. Before the dream of disco dies, it’s time to get down to the Theatre Centre and make the scene. There’s one Thursday show tonight only at 7p.m.; then Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2:30 p.m. in the Circle Theatre.