A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare at Multicultural Arts Center

Actors’ Shakespeare Project closes its 13th season with the definitive Shakespearean recipe for mirth and magic. Start with equal parts poetry and wit, add one misapplied love potion, stir in a feuding celestial couple, and finish with the most unintentionally awful play-within-a-play ever created, and you get A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Director Patrick Swanson’s production will celebrate the creative center of dreams, and how the spirit world can interfere with mortal destinies. Likely first performed as a formal entertainment at the wedding of Queen Elizabeth the First’s godchild, Shakespeare’s hilarious and hallucinatory A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also his most enduringly popular play. In Paddy’s remix, we are guests at a wedding celebration that has been going strong for 400 years. Set in a hideaway location that simultaneously evokes Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the “White Box” of Peter Brook’s 1970 production, this is a "rave" that celebrates the sublime and the ridiculous. Boasting the sweetest and most vicious love scenes, and music that both stimulates and soothes the savage beast, this is the party to crash!

Performances are May 10-June 4, 2017 at Multicultural Arts Center, 41 Second Street, Cambridge. For tickets and more information, visit actorsshakespeareproject.org.