Bard meets hysteria in fun-loving farce

Combine Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” with Hollywood in the 1930s and you get a serviceable screwball farce.

Ken Ludwig’s “Shakespeare in Hollywood” punches all of the commercial farce buttons: mistaken identities, comic misunderstandings and lovers in compromising positions. It’s about Hollywood’s misguided 1934 attempt to film Shakespeare’s most magical comedy.

I can’t say “Shakespeare in Hollywood” is the best of Ken Ludwig’s mostly predictable farces (“Lend Me a Tenor,” “Moon Over Buffalo”) but it does have the considerable advantage of being based on the best possible source material.

If you have even a passing interest in Shakespeare, you’ll probably get a kick out of the way Ludwig plants Oberon and Puck in the middle of a Hollywood sound stage and lets the Shakespeare allusions fly.

You should also enjoy director Wes Deitrick’s rambunctious 30-plus actor cast. They immerse themselves completely in the spirit of screwball farce, which means that they race around the stage in a state of good-natured hysteria for two solid hours.

And you should particularly enjoy the two other-worldly stars of the show, Damon C. Mentzer as Oberon and Kathie Doyle-Lipe as Puck. These two play the only two characters who are not creatures of Hollywood. They are creatures of a magical wood near Athens, which is to say, the real fairy creatures of Shakespeare’s play, implausibly imported to the Warner Bros. lot.

Doyle-Lipe demonstrates once again why she is one of Spokane’s true native talents. She capers across the stage with glee, does cartwheels from wing to wing, and rubs her hands together in mischievous delight at her own ability to sow romantic chaos among the stars. Her legs move so fast when she is running – which is almost all the time – she looks like one of those cartoon characters whose legs are just a blur. You half expect to hear the sound of squealing tires.

Despite all of that, Mentzer owns this play. With his leather jerkin and his hair sticking straight up, he’s a commanding king with a thundering voice to match. Whenever he is angry, which is often, effects of lightning and thunder play across the stage, yet this is hardly necessary since Mentzer himself can create the same effect with a lowering eyebrow and a baritone oath.

The cast is dotted with effective supporting turns, including Jamie Flanery as the imposing Austrian director Max Reinhardt, Anne Mitchell as the comically low-class starlet Lydia and Kristin McKernan as the sweet and naïve love interest, Olivia.

The comic action turns, naturally, on a magic floral love-potion and a man who is transformed into a braying jackass.

However, I can completely understand why the Royal Shakespeare Company, which commissioned this play from Ludwig, never actually produced it. Ludwig’s script is hardly up to their standards. He has a weakness for clichés and he seems to have no embarrassment about going for the cheap and predictable gag.

His language, too, is often bland. When Lydia repeats the words, “I woo, I woo,” Reinhardt accuses her of sounding like a “bird.”

Can you imagine Shakespeare settling for the word “bird”? He would have called her a cuckoo at the least, or a wag-tail or woodcock at best.

Fortunately, this comedy is riddled with Shakespeare quotes, some directly out of “Midsummer.”

So what Ludwig can’t supply, the Bard most certainly does.