A Midsummer Night's Dream 

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Brodie Brockie

March 10 - 13, 2022
Arthur Miller Theatre, 1226 Murfin Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Hermia loves Lysander, but her father doesn’t approve. Instead he wants her to marry her other suitor, Demetrius (who Hermia’s best-friend Helena has a huge crush on). Hermia and Lysander plot to run away so they can be together, but Hermia tells
Demetrius of their plan in order to try to score points with him. Demitrius follows Hermia and Lysander into the woods and Helena follows him.

It’s there that the four lovers attract the attention of Oberon, the king of the fairies who is currently sparring with his queen, Titania. Oberon sends his mischievous assistant, Puck, to use a magic flower to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena. Puck mixes the humans up, though, and accidentally makes Lysander fall in love with Helena instead.

Meanwhile, a troupe of bumbling actors run into Puck too, and the egotistical Botttom soon finds himself with a donkey’s head. It all gets a lot more mixed up before it gets fixed again, because as Lysander says, “the course of true love never did run smooth.”

"Reason and love keep little company nowadays," Bottom says, but really - that's true of any time period. Shakespeare's classic comedy of criss-crossed lovers, meddling fairies, and bumbling actors is full of timeless themes and jokes that are as funny now as they were hundreds of years ago. A tale set in ancient Athens still rings true in the renaissance, Elizabethan England... or the awesome 80s.