Editor's pick: Shakespeare in the park

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Fri., Aug. 19 and 26, 7:00 p.m. in LaPolt Park, Liberty, NY. Free.

“Joseph Papp up in the Catskills? Sure, I’d love to do it.” That was Oliver King’s response when Robert Dadras of Sullivan Performing Arts first approached him about developing Sullivan County’s very own Shakespeare in the Park.

When it comes to theatre, King is a natural person to come to for help: he trained with the legendary acting coach Lee Strasburg in the early 1970s, was a member of the Shakespeare Society of American during his fifteen years in Los Angeles and is currently teaching drama at the Hudson Valley Conservatory. The only problem was that King also already had a busy full-time schedule helping local at-risk teens in his position with Teen Link to Community.

But sometimes what looks like a problem can turn out to be the solution, and King found a way to bring his work with youth and his theatrical expertise together in one place. The kids at Teen Link needed something to keep them busy during the summer—well, how about putting on a play? Some of them couldn’t take the summer off without getting a job; the Center for Workforce Development stepped in to provide funding so that members of cast and stage crew could be paid. The upcoming presentation of a “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” is, to begin with, a miracle of community collaboration, with King serving as the node connecting all the strings.

From speaking to King, it sounds as though audiences are in for a fascinating dramatic interpretation as well. He speaks of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” as centered around two fundamental “family-issue dynamics.” What sets the action in motion is a young lady (Hermia) who defies her father, and what sows confusion is a custody battle between King Oberon and Queen Titania of the fairies over the changeling she has adopted. By identifying these universal forms, King has highlighted aspects of the play that can make it resonate with modern audiences as much as it did with the Elizabethans.

In order to adapt the play for its modern cast and audiences, King said he cut a substantial amount of what he calls Shakespeare’s “excessive language.” But he maintained the iambic pentameter and the rhyming dialogue from the original manuscript. Far from being put off by these archaic and unfamiliar conventions, the kids seem to love the language, according to King. After all, the idea of rhyming dialogue has an easily recognizable modern counterpart: rap.