Bob and I met our friends Deb and Joan for a lazy afternoon in Dimond Park. (That name is spelled correctly, by the way. The park is called "Dimond," not "Diamond" as you might suppose.) We unfolded our lounge chairs under a shade tree to watch Woman's Will's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Woman's Will is an all-female troupe that mostly performs Shakespeare (hence the pun.) It's a small group without much money, but they've been around for a few years. They did a spirited rendition of The Dream, updating it to the seventies and substituting some Bay Area references for Elizabethan ones. They sang a lot of well-known golden oldies. Fortunately, they all had marvelous voices. The play ended with a rousing chorus of "Let the Sun Shine In."
At first it seems strange to watch women play male roles, but after a while it seems entirely natural. After all, men used to perform all the female roles back in Shakespeare's day. The troupe did a good job. They were lively and funny with a lot of horseplay though the poetry of Shakespeare's language didn't really come through. Since they're not professionally trained Shakespearian actors, I was willing to forgive them for that. Besides, they were competing with loud picnics on either side of the stage filled with screaming kids and water balloon fights.
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