Shakespeare’s tangled love romp, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is fodder yet again for a contemporary retelling, this time set in a typical American high school preparing for a staging of Romeo and Juliet. The comical all-male production stars the bumbling football team and leaves best friends Helena and Hermia unhappily un-cast. Instead, the girls spend every waking moment crushing on bad boy Dmitri and nice guy Alexander in a seemingly endless series of alternating soliloquies in the form of emails, IMs, passed notes, and diary entries. The obsessive nature of the two protagonists and their gushing girl-speak is spot-on authentic. The ping-ponging format and awkwardly shifting POV, however, makes the story wearisome and confusing as it tries too hard to playfully salute the original in aggressively modern terms. (Fiction. 12-16)
