I am seldom a fan of a director’s “bright ideas.” Too often, the director substitutes his imagination for that of Shakespeare’s. No contest. Occasionally, though, the bright idea works: Baz Luhrmann’s decision to place Romeo and Juliet in the cauldron of Verona Beach and Trevor Nunn’s depiction of Viola and Sebastian playing at identical twins before the shipwreck in Twelfth Night. Each decision results in a brilliant film.

Peter Brown, director of the Fenix Theatre Company’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which I saw under the grand old oaks of Deering Oaks Park in Portland, Maine, and which travels to Damariscotta on the third week of August, moves the script of the play around. It works. The script itself finds the Fairy Queen, Titania, blaming all kinds of climate change and other disasters on her quarrel with Oberon, King of Fairies, over possession of an orphan. But that long speech does not come until after the opening scene, in which Hermia is told by the Athenian Duke, Theseus, that she must marry Demetrius or face severe consequences. She and her preferred Lysander resolve to flee the harsh Athenian law. Are we to infer retrospectively that the problems in Theseus’s court result from the bitter tug-of-war in the fairy kingdom?

Perhaps. What Peter Brown does is to place the quarrel at the beginning of his production. Hermia’s problem, as Titania makes clear, is indeed a result of the quarrel.

Almost right away, we hear Oberon saying, “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” Oberon tries to get Titania to agree that the sun is the moon, à la Petruchio in the Fenix’s previous production, The Taming of the Shrew, but she will not play a submissive Katherine. “We are her parents,” says Titania, embracing Hermia. We are responsible for her dilemma and for resolving it. Lysander comes up with the idea of escaping from Athens after Titania has whispered in his ear. Thus, the manipulation that Oberon and Puck manage and mismanage later on in the play is pulled forward to account for the earlier action.

The entire world is fairy-infused, not just the midnight woods. Quince, the parody-Shakespeare who directs the play-within-the play, is also Puck, who stage manages the mixups in the woods. Theseus and his Amazon, Hippolyta, are in conflict over Hermia just as Oberon and Titania have fought over the changeling child that Titania has inherited from his dead mother. Hermia becomes the orphan. The two courts are interchangeable. To fuse them, however, is to lose the rational voice of Theseus as he debates Hippolyta later on about the meaning of the story the lovers have told. I think that could have been included, although Director Brown must have felt that by that later moment we could not tell who was who. This interpretation would have favored Hippolyta’s intuitive grasp of the truth of the lovers’ narrative, but then, so does the play itself. The play shows that the results of the newfound amity between Titania and Theseus flow back into the mortal world, almost as if Shakespeare were saying, I should have thought of that earlier! But new harmonies do not necessarily mean that the mortal counterparts, Hippolyta and Theseus, must agree about everything!

The production, though, achieves an integration that even this short and subtly interrelated script seldom achieves. The world of the play becomes coherent in its shaping, even if many of the characters – the four young lovers – find their plight inexplicable. Or – if comprehensible, it is so only because Helena rides her disbelief at her lovability into latent paranoia, because Hermia has always had a thing about her lack of height, and because of the love-juice that is being sluiced around by Puck.

Dream is an early play. Shakespeare is still experimenting with worldviews. He can create a Richard III who behaves as if he were existential modern man but who discovers that he abides in an Augustinian world that includes a magister interior, an inner coding that comes from God and that can be distorted but not eradicated. That Richard III loses at Bosworth Field, though, is probably more a decision that history has already made than of God’s judgment. Lady Macbeth, much later, discovers what Richard learned. She is damned before she dies (”Hell is murky”) in a world that is of a piece. If one kills a king, one elicits cosmic outrage and turns the order of things upside down. Mousing owls suddenly kill falcons. The play emerges from the Gunpowder Plot that would have blown King James, formerly of Scotland, at the moon. Therefore, it expands the killing of a king to its ultimate dimensions. If the world of Hamlet is seen as a fallen Catholic world, it makes sense. We can understand why no efforts to contact God will work, why words fly up, but all rituals are maimed rites. Things cannot be set right until the regicide is removed from the center of the body politic. The world of King Lear invokes pagan gods like Apollo but seems to be a culture groping toward Christian values. Shakespeare’s point is that it does not matter what world we are in. Cordelia dies. If Christian archetypes are at work, Resurrection (”You do me wrong to take me out of the grave”) precedes Crucifixion – the hanging of Cordelia. That reconfiguration makes Lear very disturbing. The Tempest, like Lear, is syncretic, that is, a blending of different value systems. But we sense a power underriding the play, pagan magic working toward a “Christian” ending.

It is this resonating energy that Director Brown provides for his Dream. The actors pursue the concept with remarkable energy. I watched six year olds near me – girls and boys – laughing and understanding the source of their hilarity.

The production brilliantly changes the way that one looks at this play. And that, indeed, is a bright idea!

H. R. Coursen’s latest book, Contemporary Shakespeare, is due this fall from Peter Lang.