Joel Brown, The Boston Globe

FEBRUARY 28, 2014

Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” sets love and imagination to play in a wooded fairyland under moonlight and features a group of wannabe actors known as “the mechanicals.” So adding puppets among the actors isn’t really a stretch, director Tom Morris says.

“One needs to be careful not to be too philosophical about these things, because the play’s a comedy, but in some ways it’s a profound comedy,” says Morris. He’s artistic director of England’s Bristol Old Vic theater, which created the show with South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company. ArtsEmerson brings it to Cutler Majestic Theatre March 6-15.

“The play depicts events in which supernatural forces meddle with the lives of humans, and it uses that meddling as a kind of metaphor for the inexplicable changes that happen when we’re in love,” Morris says, speaking from London. “A puppeteer is holding a series of inanimate objects and moving them in a way that invites the audience to create life where there is none.” Either way, it’s a kind of magic. […continued] Read Full Story

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