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A Midsummer Night's Awakening is a full-length stage play that perfectly echoes the rhythm, meter, look and feel of a 17th century Shakespearean production. Its thoroughly modern story is based on the characters and situations introduced in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, where lovelorn Athenian couples, a band of low-brow "Mechanical" thespians, and a swarm of magical fairies collide in the woods. In Shakespeare's original farce, Puck, the mischievous pixie, pours the juice from the flower "Love-In-Idleness" into various people's eyes and creates a series of spectacular reversals of amorous attention. It's one year later, and as our scene opens again, the once happily married couples have suddenly fallen out of love, and the Mechanicals are interpreting it as a sign of the moral demise of Athens. Meanwhile, the fairies are in the midst of a political row that could tear apart their mini-monarchy. So suddenly everyone is heading back into the magical woods, where Puck will anoint their eyes with the petal-juice from a new (and far more potent) flower: the Pansy. "How resplendent is a pansy's power!" exclaims Titania, the fairy queen, when she hears the news of her husband's deviant sexual appetite. For no sooner does the fairy king Oberon awake, his anointed eyes catch sight of Bottom, one of the Mechanicals, who has mysteriously sprouted a massive pair of breasts. Meanwhile, king Theseus is lusting after the much younger Hermia, while his wife, the queen, is determined to seduce young Helena into a lesbian love-affair. And, if that weren't enough, the two young husbands, Demetrius and Lysander, have succumbed to the pansy's magic and are decidedly in love with each other. Fearing that Athens will be forever changed when its adulterous, sexually liberated and thoroughly queer citizens return from a night of strange debaucheries in the woods, the Mechanicals have decided it's up to them to set Athenian morals straight, and to do it they've resolved to perform a didactic and sermonizing play. Naturally, the piece they've chosen is one that upholds the highest standards of decent, Republican family values: "Oedipus Rex."
