She may have forsworn his bed and company, but Titania’s not done dealing with Oberon just yet. For TK Fringe, Mad River Theatre presents The Fall After Midsummer, a terrifically tense two-hander written and directed by Chloë Whitehorn. With a savvy blend of flowery language and punchy comedic sensibilities, this present-day sequel to A Midsummer Night’s Dream knocks toxic tropes off their dusty pedestals, conjuring a spellbinding, Shakespearean whodunnit full of twists and turns. 

In The Fall After Midsummer, faerie queen Titania is reimagined as modern-day actress Tania (Shannon Donnelly), whose on-again, off-again, ne’er-do-well husband Ron (Michael Donnelly) visits her dressing room with an ill-timed request. Iridescent shades of strength, derision, vulnerability, and sensuality gleam in Shannon Donnelly’s performance as her fairy wings and ethereal makeup scintillate under the stage lights. For his part, Michael Donnelly embodies the snide, jealous Ron with the overconfident swagger of a 500-year-old faerie king and a level of glottal fry that would make any self-respecting radio host quake in their booth. The real-life couple brings intense, almost blush-worthy chemistry to their performance, and the power dynamic between Tania and Ron shifts palpably throughout the play, maintaining an air of suspense until the very last moments.

The show exudes an elevated energy that might come across as over-the-top compared to the hyper-realist acting style that seems to be the more popular choice nowadays, but the dialled-up drama serves this play well — it’s Shakespeare’s world, and Tania and Ron are thriving in it. While Oberon and Titania play an important cosmic role in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the arc of their relationship — their fight, his revenge, her humiliation, their reconciliation — leaves several troubling questions for a modern writer to explore. In this adaptation, Whitehorn casts Tania as a member of the mechanicals, the troupe of actors led by Nick Bottom who perform the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In doing so, she weaves The Fall After Midsummer cleverly into the canon, offering the perfect stage for these larger-than-life characters to hash out another argument, and, perhaps, to change the outcome this time. 

Whitehorn’s critique of toxic relationships — more specifically, the way that readers and audiences are trained to see toxic love as true love — is made all the more lucid by entangling it in a tale of romantic fantasy. Dressed in the dreamy trappings of its genre, The Fall After Midsummer manages to capture both the guilty pleasure of reading a bodice-ripper and the satisfaction of listening to a smart, funny friend give that same bodice-ripper a brutal feminist takedown. 

--Intermission Magazine, Haley Sarfeld

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Clarissa on her Deathbed 

(New Play Exchange review by Grace Everett)

“The title drew me in, and Whitehorn’s masterful writing kept me reading. Whitehorn successfully creates a world in which Clarissa's make-believe, her choice of escapism, masks reality from the audience until Clarissa herself is forced to come to terms with her situation. This makes that reveal even more gritty and painful, and allows us as audience members to view that moment through a youthful lens. Whitehorn manages to make the audience feel like small figures in a big world, a world that feels an awful lot like it did when we were young. Excellent play!”