A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Festival Theatre. The “midsummer” and “night” parts are just right in this open-air Oak Park production, which teems with fireflies that might pass for otherworldly creatures. It’s the “dream” side, the product of Shakespeare’s poetry, that’s deficient in this slapdash remount. Rather than resolve the comedy’s divergent worlds of manipulative fairies, mismatched lovers, rough mechanicals, and silver-tongued heroes, directors Peter Toran and Dale Calandra put them further asunder. Toting gigantic parasols for no particular reason, flower children Titania and Oberon clash both with the Elizabethan clowns doing “Pyramus and Thisbe” and with the Athenian lovers, who look lost in ways the Bard didn’t intend. Chris Heuther’s intrusive sound design is every bit as erratic as the characters and their eras.
