Wesley: Hi, I’m Wesley.Robyne: and I’m Robyne.Wesley: and this is Obstructed View. Robyne: Today we’ll be discussing A Midsummer Night’s Dream presented by the Pearl Theatre Company and the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Wesley:  For those of you who don't know the play, we've added a link to the plot summary as well as a performance. This particular production by the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, used only five performers to tell the whole story. Those Performers are Mark Bedard, Sean McNall, Jason O'Connell, Joey Parson, and Nance Williamson. Robyne: We're gonna start off today discussing design. Our scenic designer was John McDermott, our costume designer was Jessica Wegener Shay, our lighting design was by Eric Southern, and sound design by Mikhail Fiksel. Wesley why don't you start us off?Wesley: The design work was very bare and sparse in terms of the scenic design. You got to see the back wall of the theater, and the stage was bare of any scenic element.Robyne: I found the scenic design to not quite be minimalist but barren.Wesley: The scenic design really tried to fight for the empty space sort of feel and the groundwork, the stage was covered with a bunch of pebbles-Robyne: or sand.Wesley: and there was neon tape, multicolored neon tape placed around the set. And hanging from the rafters in the upstage area, was a blue amorphous curtain like thing -Robyne: Yeah, it took me a while, but I really fell for the scenic design with the exception of that hanging back material, which I didn’t really see a purpose in, other than as a place for them to light. I really liked the bareness of the stage with the concept they were going for, at the same time I didn’t like the concept they went for.Wesley: Fair. I mean for me, the bareness of the stage made sense. I liked actually almost the entirety of the design on principal when I walked into the theater.Robyne: Yeah.Wesley: When I sat down I was excited for the performance we were about to see. I don’t think that the set elements necessarily meshed with the performers and the work they were doing on the same level. I think they were both well done but I didn’t see a unification of the two aesthetics.Robyne: Yeah, I really felt that there was no cohesion between the designs. I got the sense that the lighting, costume, and scenic, were all at least aiming for the same world, but not all in the same realm, if that makes sense, at least product wise. Design-wise, they may have all been on the same page. But the sound design, it was very barren, not in the same sense that the stage was, it was very lacking. There was not a lot of it. A lot of the sound was created by the performers. Which I get, but the choices that were made in the intermission, pre-music, and post show were all very non-cohesive.Wesley: And I do think a lot of that is based off of what I was reading the pearl theatre’s dramaturge about midsummer, which was that this is a dream world where times collide. It’s sort of like from The Frogs “The setting, Ancient Athens, the time, The Present Day.” That sort of dream sense you have when you walk into your house, and for some reason, you know it’s France.  And I think they’re trying to get that sort of disjointed feel, however, I think that the design work really spoke for the directorial concept, but it didn’t really add much to the conversation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.Robyne: Yeah, I just didn’t feel that the Dream aesthetic meshed. I didn’t feel as if I was in a dream. Somewhere between the - I’m really sorry Jessica, I hated those costumes, the jumpsuits with the neon strips, seemed really out of place and only there to be utilized by the lighting designer’s use of the neon lights, the black lights, which were fine every once and again but that’s how they communicated that magic was being done and that felt really kitschy and unstylized, to me, it felt sophomoric really, in it’s “N