Review: Dowling's 'Midsummer' rocks the ground, again

Of the two dozen or so performers in the Guthrie's current production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," one stuck with me the next morning.

And it wasn't Tyler Michaels, despite his lithe and energetic portrayal of Puck. Michaels' performance is amazing, and fearlessly physical. He's airborne much of the time — why walk when you can bound like a deer? — but he doesn't often touch the heart.

The actor who got me in that region was Michael Fell.

He plays Flute, one of the Rude Mechanicals, the working stiffs who stage a play within the play. They may be the funniest characters Shakespeare ever wrote, and Director Joe Dowling drives their comedy seemingly as far as it can go. When the troupe finally gets a chance to perform its blood-letting, stuffed-dog-stomping vignette about the doomed Pyramus and Thisby before the noble elite of Athens, both the Athenian audience and the Minnesota one dissolve in helpless laughter.

After all, what's funnier in a professional theater than community theater?

Pyramus plays his death scene like chopped ham, cutting out his bowels and eyeballs but never running out of lines. When it seems his corpse might finally be content to lie still, his bride Thisby — portrayed by a gangly young man who had begged not to have to play a woman — gets her turn.

And in a production full of flying fairies and special effects, this is when the real magic happens.

Flute, the bellows-mender, who just hours ago was running all his lines together without punctuation, delivers a scene of heartbreaking depth and sincerity. The audience gradually stops laughing. "O Sisters Three, come, come to me," Flute says, calling upon the mythological figures who determined the length of a life's thread. "Tongue, not a word! Come, trusty sword ..."

Thisby's final lines are as overwrought as those of Pyramus, but Flute finds the emotional core of them and of himself. In his short dying speech, he achieves the kind of honesty that is an actor's miracle — and it can happen in community theater, or professional or high school or middle school theater.

When Thisby is dead, Pyramus pops up with more lines, and the comedy resumes.

Maybe you've seen "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Guthrie before — and maybe more than once. Maybe more than once, even, under Dowling's direction. You've come to expect a lavish production and fairies who will obey Oberon's command to "rock the ground" with rock 'n' roll. Is there anything new here?

That question misses the point. Dowling will be moving on soon, and he's a master of this kind of theater. Audiences should no sooner pass up a final chance to see a Dowling production of Shakespeare than an Osmo Vanska performance of Sibelius. The work may be familiar, but there's always something new.

Like a Thisby who makes you weep.