Puck

This cheeky riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Allen (Patricia Wants to Cuddle) drops Puck, here reimagined as a nonbinary reality TV producer, into a friend’s wedding week, where they can’t resist their professionally honed urge to meddle. Puck arrives at the luxurious Athenian Hotel for the marriage of their college friends Mia and Damon. Mia previously dated the newly sober Zander, part of their college friend group, for eight years; she’s only been with Damon for one. Meanwhile, Lena, the last member of their clique, still hopelessly pines after Damon. Over a series of gender-segregated events that make Puck feel like the odd person out, they orchestrate meetings, mediate between exes, and plot to stop the ceremony—despite the best efforts of maid of honor Robyn. Allen uses Puck as an agent of chaos to highlight the manicured production of wedding culture and how heteronormativity is performed and policed. Puck’s reality-TV instincts frame intimacy as plot and people as playthings, but their attempts to shape the narrative may keep them from finding their own happiness. Bursting with humor, interpersonal drama, and badly timed desire, this equally smart and playful narrative has a point to make: that control is antithetical to intimacy and the course of true love, whether queer or straight, resists both scripting and stage management. It’s a delight. (June)