This ain't Disney

BRITTEN HAS WRITTEN With his incredible ear for haunting instrumental combinations, Britten wrote some of the 20th-century's most twisted operas.

Few composers in the past hundred years had Benjamin Britten's ability to disturb. The characters in his operas commit some of the most unsettling acts imaginable—from the child-abusing Peter Grimes to the possible pederasty of Peter Quint in The Turn of the Screw—and his instrumental works are disconcerting, too.

Each of these characters should be repellent, yet there is something magnetic about them that makes us try to understand them. In Peter Grimes, the title character is the ultimate outsider, something the homosexual Britten acutely understood. But Britten invites us to associate with Grimes and, in turn, come to see that there's a little of the outsider in each of us. This table-turning effect gives his works a peculiar weight, a quality of keeping their true meaning just out of reach.

It comes as no surprise that the tables are turned again in Britten's 1960 opera A Midsummer Night's Dream, which Chicago Opera Theater is mounting in a modern-dress production. This isn't going to be a sweet pastoral tale, either, according to Alexander Platt, COT's resident conductor and an excellent Britten interpreter. "We've all been brought up to think that this is the 'family show' of the Shakespeare plays, but this is not the Disneyfied Shakespeare that we grew up with."

Taking up Shakespeare's tale of love gone mad, Britten wrote another work in which things aren't what they seem. Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the Fairies, are fighting for control of an Indian boy who's Titania's servant. It's not just about this boy, of course—it's a struggle for control in their relationship as well, according to soprano Danielle de Niese, who's playing Titania. "These are two unhappy, unsatisfied people," she says, "and I think that Oberon really isn't getting any at this point, and Titania isn't fulfilled, either." There's also Puck, who in this production, says Platt, "isn't Puck a la Mickey Rooney, it's Puck a la urban cyberpunk."

As in Britten's other operas, there are roles for young boys, with five boy sopranos taking the roles of the Fairies. For Britten, children were usually symbols of innocence. But their role in A Midsummer Night's Dream is more vague, as they're both Titania's helpers and, well, little boys. "I think their role is ambiguous," Platt says. "This is a dangerous piece of music," since Britten doesn't make the distinction clear. He never made things easy for his audiences, forcing them to contend with thoughts they might not confront otherwise. Sure, the Fairies sing happy little songs about gamboling in the woods and preparing a place for Titania to sleep, but Britten's music is intentionally vague about whether that is all that they are doing.

Along with the characters from the realm of the supernatural are the real people, the Rude Mechanicals (or Rustics as they're labeled here) and the two pairs of lovers, Lysander and Hermia, and Demetrius and Helena. (Platt admits that Shakespeare's plot can get complicated: "There are moments in rehearsal where we're asking ourselves, 'Okay, what's going on here? Who's doing who?'") "This is an entire cast of adults who have no idea of what love is," Platt says. The couples, both fleeing Athens for its impermissive strictures, clutch at any chance for happiness that comes their way.

The Rustics, by contrast, "are the only genuine people in the entire opera," Platt says. They're staging the melodramatic play Pyramus and Thisbe, which is about two young lovers who end up killing themselves, Romeo-and-Juliet style. Led by Bottom, the Rustics end up being funny in spite of themselves.

"Bottom's someone who was in a couple of plays in high school and so he thinks he's Laurence Olivier," Platt says. But what ends up making it so moving is the Rustics' dedication. "We all know that the little play they do is this very shallow take on Romeo and Juliet. But the Rustics don't know that. They think this is a towering masterwork." Seeing them struggle to produce this ridiculous play ends up being rather heartening, instead of merely amusing.

There is a reason Britten is regarded as the greatest operatic composer of the 20th century: He couldn't be ignored. He can shock with a single well-placed chord and his characters show us shortcomings in ourselves we'd rather not admit to having. But it's our loss if we don't watch and listen.

A Midsummer Night's Dream plays at the Harris Theater Wednesday 18.