Review: ‘Midsommar Night’s Dream’ is a crazed festival of love, violence and spellcasting 

Buckwild, bloody wackiness ensues in the comedy mashup A Midsommar Night’s Dream, onstage at Limelight Theatre through October 20 with a sporting, young and attractive cast down for nearly anything to get you to laugh. 

Combining elements of Shakespeare’s lush romantic comedy with the 2019 Ari Aster folk horror movie, this nutty, low-budget show does not attempt anything weighty, despite its source material, but it mostly succeeds at what it’s aiming to do with a zany lack of subtlety. 

The show feels like one of those circa-2000s spoofs with the word Movie in the title, like Disaster Movie, Scary Movie or Not Another Teen Movie. The amount of fun you have is directly connected to the number of references you get, not just to the two works mentioned in the title but also Atlanta-specific nods, Taylor Swift and TikTok stuff. Jokes fly fast, and not all of them stick. But enough of them land.

Additionally, the cast spends much of the show interacting with the audience, with their characters involving attendees in drinking games or other festivities or speaking directly to them. The show is mostly scripted by writer-director Erin Stegeman, but the interactive elements require the cast to be able to adapt to unplanned moments on a dime, and they are game from the time the doors open.

Set in modern times, a group of amorous, pretty, college-aged tourists descend upon a kitschy, primitive Scandinavian festival led by what may be a cult. Using fairy magic, a very charming, athletic sprite named Puck (Matt Metzger) does his best to keep King Oberon (Matt Fowler) and Queen Titania (Vanessa Reynolds) entertained and not fighting. This leads to casting many wild love spells among the tourists, who will be killed if they mess up any of the ancient traditions.

Bottom (Mitchell Mack) is an eccentric, loud Georgia State drama student on a backpacking trip through Europe, unaware of how culturally tone-deaf he seems to the locals. Helena (Diana Spieller), who’s a bit unbalanced after a family tragedy, spends her days obsessively stalking Demitrius (Dan Wenzel), who wants nothing to do with her. He’s hung up on the vain influencer Hermaja (Alexandra Archer), whose interests lie elsewhere.

Among the cast, Metzger is a standout, doing tremendous stunt work while also keeping the audience’s focus on Puck’s plot shenanigans. Archer and Spieller have great chemistry as frenemies trying to navigate a crazy love triangle involving love spells, obsession and pregnancy rituals. Mack does his damnedest to keep an intentionally obnoxious, obtuse, loud character as fun as possible.

The show’s silliest scene — which is really saying something because all the scenes are nuts — involves an orgy where the challenge of stage nudity is solved in a rather wacky, novel way.

A Midsommar Night’s Dream is very, very goofy — sometimes exhaustingly so. But this cast deserves praise for understanding the assignment and doing their best.

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.