Floresta Amazonica.

I went to Brazil hoping to see some of the more elusive mammals in the Atlantic rain forest, and I did see two different groups of golden lion tamams in the wild. What I never expected to see was a remarkable production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Rio de Janeiro. It was called Floresta Amazonica, the wood outside Athens having been changed to the Amazon forest, and one of our host tamarin experts suggested that it was probably the first ecological production of Dream. It did open about the time of the Earth Summit. A complex and beautiful production that employed 200 professionals, most of them not on stage, it was the brainchild of Lucelia Santos, who not only produced but played Puck. She persuaded Werner Herzog to direct it. Herzog has apparently made his peace with nature, which he publicly denounced after the fatalities that occurred when he was shooting Fitzcarraldo on the Amazon, for an epigraphic line of his ("When the forest dies, dreams die too") appears in the program in German, Portuguese, and English. Although the filmmaker had never directed a play before (in fact he claims to have seen only four plays in his life, all of them bad), he and his Brazilian codirector (Marcio Meirelles) have created a highly imaginative production which sticks close to Shakespeare's text--at least to the order of scenes-but weaves a highly theatrical web around the familiar work. They are greatly helped by the designers of sets, costumes, and lighting, who, like the directors, come in pairs--one German (or Austrian), the other Brazilian.

The play---or its atmosphere--begins before one enters the Teatro Joao Caetano. Giant fallen trees (ersatz, I hope, although Herzog knocked down real trees enough a decade ago for Fitzcarraldo) lie on the lawn, and one graces the roof of the theater. These are mere indicators; the forest inside is more functional. A tangle of trees and flowers and vines reaches halfway round the auditorium with gaps through which actors can pass and sound equipment can send out the grunts and screeches of invisible animals and birds. In the scene in which Puck leads Lysander and Demetrius astray, the actors keep reappearing out of this forest, Lysander swinging in on a vine, Demetrius (perhaps because the actor playing him is less athletic) running in trailing a vine as though he has just landed off stage.

The play opens with a filmed sequence: Amazona 2050. Seen from low-flying plane, cut and burning sections of the rain forest convey manmade desolation, a vista which is as beautiful as it is appalling, like the art photographs of oil slicks published a few years ago. Then, since this is not 2050, the words "But we can still dream'' appear on the screen, and film gives way to stage. In the dimly lit forest, bizarre creatures appear--mutant, perhaps, certainly strange amalgams of insect, bird, and animal. It is a fascinating image which may have been intended as another warning or a confirmation that we have moved into a dream or a suggestion of the exotic richness of the fauna of the rain forest. The stage goes black, and when the light comes up again, the play proper begins.

Hippolyta strolls in--a pretty woman in a light summer dress-- and, sitting down alongside a stream, she dabs water on her neck and chest. This business has nothing to do with Shakespeare's opening scene between her and Theseus. It is a signal to the audience that there is real water on stage, for when Puck makes his first entrance he bursts out of the stream, a lizard of some kind, an energetic performer in a wet suit, black with spots. It is with Puck and his fellow fairies that the production is most inventive. In Shakespeare, the night belongs to the fairies and, in terms of the plot, that is true here too; but for Herzog and his associates there is a division within the fairy world, evident in the costumes between Titania (light) and Oberon (dark). Titania has large gossamer wings that seem to float even when she is still. Her followers--some winged, some not--are attractive, provocative women (Mustardseed is downright lubricious) who help make the scenes with Bottom much sexier than they are usually played; at one point, Titiana grabs his donkey's tail, from the front, pulling it through his crotch. The whole production-the humans and fairies alike-- emphasizes the contention of the translator (Domingos de Oliveira) that Dream is "an erotic, sensual play."

In contrast to Titiana, Oberon is in black with rigid wings. My fellow ecotourists insisted that he is a dung beetle and indeed, at one point, a dung-colored ball is rolled onto the stage out of which pops the ubiquitous Puck (do not look to this Dream for taxonomic accuracy) and--for a nice gag--it is rolled across the sleeping Helena on its way offstage and Oberon's followers must pat her cheeks to be sure she is still breathing. The program identifies these creatures as "nocturnal beings, animals, goblins, and elves," but from their behavior--chattering, scratching, grooming one another--they appear to be monkeys; in fact, they are a talented company of acrobats (Intrepida Trupe), which means that any of them can start moving across stage, do a backward or forward flip, and continue along without hesitation.

For the most part the human characters are conventionally attractive, but the lovers' scenes really need the language for best effect, and Portuguese is Greek to me. The "rude mechanicals'' are something else again. They play very broadly and often very funnily--particularly during their presentation of the "Lamentable Comedy" of Pyramus and Thisby--and most of them have identifying comic mannerisms. Snug, for instance, does an old-fashioned vaudeville stammer, which has not been heard in this country since Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, and he hangs onto it even when he plays Lion, roaring a most hesitant roar; Starveling scratches his behind with first one and then the other hand and then smells his fingers comparatively. Subtle, these fellows are not, but overall they work as well as or better than their counterparts in most productions of Dream.

At the end of the play, when lovers are properly paired and the nuptial feast at an end, when the audience is about to shake itself free of the Dream, there is a sudden burst of light at the back of the stage, like a flash of fire, and the characters freeze as they watch it. It is a non-Shakespearean moment that reaches back to the filmed opening. Then Puck breaks the tableau and comes forward to ask for the audience's applause. Even as we give it, the flash of fire stays with us. "When the forest dies, dreams die too."