Shakespeare in the Park is a city summer tradition. People pack a picnic and a blanket and go to their local green space to watch live drama under the trees. Now the Adirondack Lakes Center for the Arts has taken the concept to state park scale.

The Arts Center will present 45-minute outdoor productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at parks and beaches in twelve Adirondack towns. This regional adaptation of the play is as Elizabethan as Elizabethtown.

“In the original version the nobility of a town go into the woods for a night and strip away the trappings of society and find out what it’s like to be a human being,” says Arts Center Director Stephen Svoboda. “In our production the young lovers are going to be sophisticated summer people who come up to the Adirondacks in their Gucci shoes, not expecting this rustic world. The male faries will be romanticized lumberjacks and the female fairies have a Sixties hippie feel with long flowy fabric, and really they’re sort of the embodiment of nature. Then the Mechanicals are the acting troupe in the play; in our version they’re going to be these Beatnik actors from New York City all in black with their bug spray, and since a lot of these performances will be on a lake, they’ll show up in a canoe, lost in the wilderness.”

The production is appropriate for all ages and is free. “It’s really accessible to the audience, something that our summer residents and year-round residents can relate to,” Svoboda says.

See the Arts Center’s Web site for details and locations. Here is a general schedule:

July 25th 2 pm THENDARA 

July 25th 7 pm TUPPER LAKE

July 26th 2 pm BLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE

July 26th 7 pm LONG LAKE

July 28th 7 pm OLD FORGE 

July 29th 2 pm RAQUETTE LAKE

July 30th 2 pm MINERVA

July 30th 7 pm INDIAN LAKE

July 31st 2 pm Hudson River Pavilion, NORTH CREEK

July 31st 7 pm PAUL SMITHS/SARANAC LAKE
August 1st 2 pm INLET 

August 1st 7 pm SPECULATOR