Paul Dunn’s Offensive Shadows is partly a commentary on and partly a sequel to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Tedious at only 90 minutes, the play’s three parts hammer home Dunn’s single, unoriginal theme: that, in the modern world, the magic is gone.

In the play’s first third, a skater boy–like Puck (Andrew Kushnir) retells the entire plot of Shakespeare’s play in a modern, expletive-filled idiom, as if Dunn thought humour would spring from the contrast between subject matter and style. Puck believes “the magic died” just after the action of Dream for two reasons. First, he alleges that Oberon and Titania soon divorced, leading to the dissolution of the fairy kingdom. Then he claims that Theseus’ statement, “I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys” (V.i.) suddenly gained widespead credence, and is to blame for mankind’s present belief in science over magic.  Dunn wants to have it both ways, but should make up his mind which factor is more important.

Having run through the plot once, Dunn forces us to relive it again in the actions of the four lovers, this time ordinary, modern, Canadian teenagers, sans magic.  It’s true that the partner-switching of Demetrius (Jason Mitchell), Lysander (Mark McGrinder), Helena (Jessica Greenberg) and Hermia (Kimwun Perehinec) can be explained by the effects of booze, drugs and raging hormones, but so what? The end is the same and the process is not as fun. And if the point still hasn't sunk in, Dunn has the four reunite in the forest five years after their marriages to reveal that none of them is happy.

To tell/re-enact a familiar story three times in succession is a sure way to boredom. There are tensions in Shakespeare’s text, but Dunn merely highlights these in bright yellow. His main contribution is his fanciful and unconvincing tale of Oberon’s decline. Nevertheless, the production is well-cast, with especially good work from Kushnir as a world-weary immortal and Perehinec as the ultimate hypersensitive virgin. Michael Walton’s varied and inventive lighting of what is basically a bare stage is also impressive. Sadly, Dunn is no Tom Stoppard or Ann-Marie MacDonald, and cannot embroider gold on the margins of the Bard. Shakespeare’s Puck tells us, “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this and all is mended” (V.i.) — “this” being that all has been a dream. Modern folk still dream, an inconvenient truth that Dunn’s cynical view deliberately ignores.