A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, Bailiwick Repertory. Heavy-handed and bewildering, Scott Cooper’s gender-altered adaptation for Bailiwick’s Pride series takes Shakespeare’s “how quickly bright things come to confusion” all too literally. The plot doesn’t thicken–it congeals. Here the fairies are gay males, and the “rude mechanicals” heterosexual females (except for Bottom, a stereotypical pushy male who wants to play all the parts in “Pyramus and Thisbe”). The lovers are straight when they enter the enchanted wood, but thanks to a fairy spell (or conversion?) they emerge as same-sex couples. It’s clumsily unclear, however, when and how they’ve fallen in love, since their interactions never display a shred of tenderness until after daylight breaks the fairy spell. Far from inverting Shakespeare’s scenario, Cooper merely complicates the contrivances. Sheer arbitrariness seems the rule, as it never is with Shakespeare.
