Shakespeare in the park is a summer tradition that at its best can be really quite lovely: blankets, Bordeaux, all the world’s a freshly mown stage. But summer is also a time of sundry discomforts, and to go piling avant-garde pretensions on top of the humidity and mosquitoes and the hideous khaki shorts is an act of artistic sadism. Scold us in March if you must, challenge our comfortable middle-class cultural assumptions with Coriolanus in a cocktail dress on a brisk evening if you feel it obligatory, but in the summer, only entertain us. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an inescapable favorite in the muggybuggy evenings: It is an undemanding play, so it is not too much work to produce, and it is as gay as a Dutch window, so it is a cinch to cast. It can seduce costumers and set-designers with an inviting canvas—trees! shrubbery! fairies! The gentle whimsicality of the story, which might strike more severe theater types as insufficiently revolutionary during the austere and bracing months of the high cultural season, is tolerated, if only barely, while Puck sweats and groundlings picnic.

It is a pagan play, and these are pagan times—or rather times in which the theater-going class aspires to a soft-core, second-rate paganism. We may dream of getting it on where the wild things are, barefoot and blissed out, but the world of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamis, like all the worlds Shakespeare imagined, a place of order and hierarchy, mercilessly