Coming from the heart of a writer whose fan base remains strong after 400 years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream celebrates love, youth and the beauty and mysterious power of nature. Traveling between exuberance and danger, innocence and transgression, waste land and wonderland, it’s a comedy about the yearning of human beings for restoration, both of nature and of themselves.

This production was originally planned for the Spring of 2020, but the worldwide pandemic prevented it from being staged. Two years later, everyone can have a better appreciation of the play’s deepest meanings. The coming of light, it seems to say, requires a plunge into darkness. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about the return to life.

As the play’s young lovers flee the heavy hand of society for the freedom of the forest, we can acknowledge what we’ve all been through and celebrate, across time, the endless cycles of renewal and the special promise of this moment.

AMY FREED (TAPS Artist-in-Residence) is the author of Shrew!, The Monster Builder, Restoration Comedy, The Beard of Avon, Freedomland, Safe in Hell, The Psychic Life of Savages, You, Nero, and other plays. She‘s a recipient of the Charles McArthur Playwriting Award (D.C.), The New York Arts Club’s Joseph Kesserling Award, a several-times winner of the LA Critics Circle Award, the Bay Area Critics Circle Award, and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her work has been seen at South Coast Repertory Theater, New York Theater Workshop, Seattle Repertory, American Conservatory Theater, Yale Rep, California Shakespeare Theater, Berkeley Rep, the Goodman, Playwright’s Horizons, Woolly Mammoth, Arena Stage, and other theaters around the country. She has held playwriting residencies at South Coast Rep, the Arena Stage, and San Diego’s Old Globe. She is currently working on a commission for South Coast Rep.

Freed received a BFA in theater from Southern Methodist University, and an MFA in Acting from the American Conservatory Theater. She has taught acting and directed for ACT’s MFA program. She’s also taught playwriting at San Francisco State and for the MFA playwriting program at UCSD.