“The course of true love never did run smooth.” So Lysander reminds Hermia, as the couple encounters difficulties in the fabled Department of Romance, which they kinda should have expected. Hermia’s dad is Duke of Athens, after all. He plays the heavy, provoking their elopement in the first of three nutty plots in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , the perennial, even required, surrealistic Shakespearean summer offering that goes best with chilled white wine, a picnic basket, a blanket and a warm date. Oberon, King of the Fairies, and the mischievous Puck arrive, with a troupe of horny actors. A magical flower potion makes you fall for the first person you see when you wake up—in the play, we mean, not in the public park in San Juan Capistrano, where this theater-under-the-stars tradition celebrates another season of the Bard.
Sun., July 11, 7:30 p.m., 2010
