by AMY BARRATT

Kevin Orr admits that the Midsummer Night's Dream he has directed for this summer's Shakespeare-in-the-Park is rather high-concept. But, he says, it's all in service of the play's message: that "the course of true love never did run smooth," but that it's worth the struggle.

"It's ended up being my homage to Baz Luhrmann, unintentionally," says Orr of the Repercussion Theatre show, which blends elements from the 16th-century world of fur traders with the flower-power generation. Shakespeare's magical tale of fairies and Amazon queens has been transported to a sort of New France of the imagination. "We knew we wanted the fairy world to be inspired by native mythology," says the boyish director of how the concept evolved. "So that put us in the New World. Next I asked myself, what was going on in Canada in Shakespeare's time?"

These questions led to a re-imagining of the text in which Hippolyta is a Cree princess, and Quince is a French-speaking Jesuit missionary. Orr figures a good 30 per cent of the text is being rendered in a language other than Shakespeare's.

Next, the director asked himself what, if anything, was going on in theatre in Canada at the time? "I kept picturing the medieval tradition where a travelling company would arrive in the village square and park their wagon and people would gather all around to watch the performance."

That image gave rise to the staging of the piece, which is quite a significant departure for Repercussion. There is a central stage, with the audience seated on all four sides, and there are also four playing areas interspersed between the blocks of spectators. The audience will be closer to the action than they have been in years with Repercussion, and the technical aspects of the show have been severely cut back.

Repercussion usually tours with mounds of sound and lighting equipment, and a large group of technicians to set it all up. This year, taking a page from Elysian River's Shakespeare-on-Mount-Royal shows, performances will start at 6:30 p.m. to take advantage of available light. A bit of floodlighting will be employed just at the end to make sure everyone can still see, but there is no lighting grid.

The idea of the market square as a gathering place somehow became linked in Orr's mind with Expo '67. And this is where the former West Island boy makes a leap of faith, and hopes that the audience will come with him. He realized that the music of that era, the '60s, is all about the rocky course of true love. So the actors intermittently recite and sing lyrics from these songs throughout the play.

Orr doesn't really care if Repercussion's audience, which comes in all ages, gets everything he is trying to do. "That they go away feeling that the spirit of love can overcome all obstacles. That's important to me. All the rest is aesthetic."

Imponderable surrender

Winner of the Just for Laughs award for Best Comedy of the Montreal Fringe festival, sketch comedy troupe The Imponderables take the stage July 20 and 22 at Cabaret Music Hall (2111 St-Laurent). Not blessed with any awards but clearly an audience favourite, Never Surrender - the world's greatest lip-synch band - has been invited to join them onstage. Both performances at 9:30 p.m. Tickets $17.50 plus tax and service charge. 845-2322

A Midsummer Night'S Dream previews july 16–17, 6:30pm, at Parc Jean-Drapeau. Official opening july 18, 6:30pm, at Parc Lafontaine. Admission by donation, 916-PARK or www.shakespeareinthepark.ca for full schedule

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