CSC theatre ends with solid production of ‘Midsummer’

And so it befell that two of my good fellows and I were invited to Duke Theseus’ palace for the enjoyment of festivities following his late nuptial with the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

Once there, we did see a brief tragedy most peculiar in its tedious mirth.

Oddly, that main entertainment of the night came after a too-long and much-overwrought explanation of how some of the duke’s other guests had plighted their troth in the preceding days and were wed to each other beside the duke that selfsame night.

However, once they had dispatched with this farcical idyll, a group of Athenian craftsmen presented the story of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in the silliest fashion I have ever witnessed.

The first to speak was one Peter Quince, a carpenter of some renown, who in the capacity of prologue did entreat us to know all that we were like to know and expect the beginning of the end.

That end did not appear at the beginning however, because then came one Snout, a tinker who was spackled all over with mortar and hung thereby with many bricks. His execution of a wall was the most masterful my eyes had ever heard.

Particularly fine were the gesticulations of his hand, in the shape of an O, which was to seem a chink in the wall, through which the eponymous lovers did converse many nights previous and implied by the players’ words.

Next, in quick succession, came Pyramus, Thisbe, and Moonshine personified.

The weaver Nick Bottom, in gleaming armor fit for Achilles himself, made a forceful and passionate Pyramus.

Francis Flute, a mender of bellows, left something to be desired in his execution of fair Thisbe. The lack was perhaps most felt in the overabundance of beard infringing on his face in full and unhelped by tonsorial art. I mean to say, I could not believe his womanliness.

Robin Starveling’s portrayal of Moonshine—or was’t the man i’ th’ moon himself?—was too esoteric to countenance and was botched by many interruptions and cat calls from the crowd. But nonetheless, her efforts were admirable.

The true star of the benighted bunch was Snug the joiner.

Though he possessed no surname to call his own, Snug commanded the stage with his nuanced and much- polished rendition of a ferocious lion. Even Aristophanes himself would have been pleased with the work.

Overall, the artistic execution of these hempen homespuns was most delightful. Their cohesion as a troupe of actors beguiled completely the otherwise odiousness of their station as base mechanicals.

Leave your hemlock at home, because this play is surely the highlight of the season and no cause for suicide.