By MICHAEL KUCHWARA

AP Drama Critic

STRATFORD, Ontario (AP) - The Stratford Shakespeare Festival has been the home to such starry actors as Christopher Plummer, Brian Bedford and, more recently, Colm Feore - each a superb performer able to negotiate major classical roles with astonishing dexterity.

Surely, it's time to elevate Geraint Wyn Davies to this illustrious club. Compelling reasons can be found in Wyn Davies' third appearance this season at the Canadian festival where he's playing Bottom the weaver in David Grindley's rowdy, laugh-infused examination of love in ``A Midsummer Night's Dream.''

The actor (who also appears in ``Julius Caesar'' and ``Macbeth'') pretty much walks away with the production, an audience-friendly romp that is determined to entertain. ``Dream'' is one of those Shakespeare comedies that practically begs a director to impose a concept on it. Grindley, best known in New York for his revivals of ``Journey's End,'' ``Pygmalion'' and ``The American Plan,'' obliges.

What that concept is never becomes quite clear, although it seems to have something to do with pop music, stretching from the mid-1950s into - shades of New York's current ``Rock of Ages'' - heavy metal of the 1980s.

But Bottom and his rustic cohorts are mercifully left more or less unchanged, unaffected by Grindley's musical conceits. And the remarkable, Welsh-born Wyn Davies, now in his sixth season at Stratford, finds the truths as well as the tickles in this irrepressible roustabout. Even more important, the actor makes him human. Not easy to accomplish since Bottom is often portrayed for cheap, easy laughs as a cartoonish, braying buffoon, particularly after he is transformed into a donkey. But check out the fabulous ears given Wyn Davies. They get a laugh all by themselves.

As for the other performers, Tom Rooney's Puck is creepily flamboyant, resembling pop songwriter Phil Spector, and the fairies, a collection of young ladies, cavort as various kinds of Goth punks who seem to have learned their bumps and grinds at Scores.

Still, the four extremely confused young lovers are artfully depicted in their romantic agony, especially Laura Condlln's Helena, a hilarious portrait of amorous desperation. And foolish desperation in the name of love is what ``Dream'' is all about.

Desperation of a political sort can be found in James MacDonald's portentous take, complete with ominous music, on ``Julius Caesar.'' This highly charged history play is difficult to sustain dramatically - with much of its suspense evaporating after its title character is assassinated.

And when that icon of ancient Rome is portrayed by Wyn Davies, the loss is doubly felt. The actor, vocally adept and physically commanding, brings a preening self-assurance to Caesar. And he has to work against the odd, time-traveling costume designs by David Boechler, with togas jarringly sharing the stage with modern outfits.

Fortunately, Wyn Davies is joined by a pair of sturdy actors: Ben Carlson, a brooding, conflicted Brutus; and Jonathan Goad, a Mark Antony who knows how to rouse the rabble in his big ``Friends, Romans, Countrymen'' speech. But Rooney, in a total transformation from his outlandish Puck in ``Dream,'' seems curiously low-key as the scheming Cassius.

By Act 2, the drama inherent in conspiracy gives way to the inevitable battle scenes, which, despite the loud firepower and much scurrying about the stage, bring the production to a surprisingly wan conclusion.

Helen Mirren's highly publicized ``Phedre'' seen this summer at Great Britain's National Theatre (and Sept. 17-26 at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre) isn't the only version of the Jean Racine tragedy around.

Stratford has its own take on the classic: a crisp new translation by Timberlake Wertenbaker and a spare, tasteful production directed by Carey Perloff, who runs San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. Maybe too tasteful.

Seana McKenna is all stylish, high-voltage despair as the anguished title character who lusts after her stepson, Hippolytus, played with manly correctness by Goad. Passion is held in check until Phedre believes her husband Theseus (Tom McCamus) is dead (not true) and then she blurts out the truth about her desires. Nothing good can come of such honesty.

Perloff has dressed her actors in lavish period costumes from the 17th century, further tying the play to Racine's own time and the action is played out on a nearly bare stage of the elongated Tom Patterson Theatre.

There is some fine work by the supporting cast, particularly Roberta Maxwell's fiercely forbidding nurse, and McCamus' understandably upset Theseus.

Despite all the talk of passion, the effect is one of coolness, admirable and clear-headed but coolness nonetheless. A little more heat would help. The production will travel to Perloff's California theater early next year.

Stratford staggers its openings through the long summer season and in its latest batch of arrivals, artistic director Des McAnuff has commendably showcased Canadian playwrights at the festival's small Studio Theatre. The results prove mixed.

The most crowd-pleasing is ``The Trespassers,'' the world premiere of Morris Panych's memory play that is long on sentiment if not surprise. You can see why audiences would take to this family tale of an emotionally volatile 15-year-old and his cantankerous - and terminally ill - grandfather who haltingly prepares the youth for life.

It's bittersweet but not terribly so, and Panych's meaty dialogue is smoothly handled by a cast that includes Joseph Ziegler as the grandfather and Noah Reid as his willing young pupil, eager to learn about drinking, womanizing and bluffing at cards.

``Rice Boy'' by Sunil Kuruvilla is another story of generational divide, this one spanning two continents. It's an episodic journey, contrasting life in Canada with life in India where 12-year-Tommy (Araya Mengesha) travels with his widowed father to visit their extended family.

The play is awash with incident. Among the more prominent: the impending marriage of Tommy's crippled cousin; the unhappy and unraveling relationship between Tommy's aunt and uncle; and his father's attempts to come to terms with the drowning death of his wife 10 years ago.

That's a lot of plot to cram into one play, and director Guillermo Verdecchia can't camouflage the production's diffuseness. Still, there is something exotically charming about the stories that celebrate a culture that the now-Canadian Tommy finds strangely fascinating.

Fascination of a cerebral kind is on display in ``Zastrozzi,'' George F. Walker's chilly dark comedy from the early 1970s. It's an intellectual exercise long on style, much of it due to Jennifer Tarver's taut direction, but short on warmth and credible characters.

Zastrozzi, the 19th-century self-proclaimed ``master criminal of all Europe,'' is out for revenge against a looney religious fanatic and, even worse, a mediocre artist named Verezzi. Along the way, he falls in love, but that doesn't prevent bodies from piling up on the small Studio stage.

Rick Roberts makes a tame title character, but Sarah Orenstein, playing one of his more enthusiastic lovers, cracks a mean whip, and the always reliable John Vickery manages to make some of Walker's more florid musings sound moderately amusing.

``Phedre,'' ``Rice Boy'' and ``Zastrozzi'' run in rep through Oct. 3, and ``The Trespassers'' through Oct. 4. ``A Midsummer Night's Dream'' plays through Oct. 30; ``Julius Caesar'' through Oct. 31.

On the Net:

www.stratfordfestival.ca

08/31/09 16:13 © Copyright The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained In this news report may not be published, broadcast or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.