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Last week, I celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first successful swim across the English Channel.

My local park is the perfect place to watch Shakespeare’s play about frolicking in the summertime. This production, from the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, was only 90 minutes on a perfect summer night, with a heat wave blessedly behind us.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the plays that are less familiar to me. I celebrated Olivia De Haviland’s 100th birthday a few years ago by watching the 1935 film version. To make sure that I could keep up, I read the summary in the Wikipedia article about the play before I attended. It was helpful to have the broad strokes of this multi-threaded story in my head.

The set was simple, as needed for a play that’s being performed in a different park every night for nearly a month.

The two back panels hide, more or less, the dressing area. The actors wore unitards, so it was a simple matter of throwing costumes on and off. There were lots of costume changes because there were only six actors to play all of those parts!

The two pyramidal towers in front were turned at various points during the play to represent fairy land, the forest (with green vines), and Athens (with gray pillars).

We knew we were in for a treat when the actors reminded us at the beginning that the words of the play were written four hundred years ago and it might take a few minutes to adjust our ears. Puck, helpfully, recited part of the epilogue as other actors translated it into modern language. I enjoyed the possibility that the play might all be a dream of each audience member — very meta of Shakespeare.

Oberon’s speech about Cupid and the love-in-idleness flower reminded me of a picture that I painted a few years ago when I was into making flowers.

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”

What a fun night! This is my first time to see a live performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Have you seen this play before?