Harebrains and tortoises Shakespeare in Hollywood; Tooth and Claw BY CAROLYN CLAY

Someone must have squirted Lyric Stage Company of Boston honcho Spiro Veloudos in the eye with the juice of a magic flower intended to make him fall in love with the first thing he saw — just before Shakespeare in Hollywood came through the transom. It’s hard to imagine another scenario leading to the Lyric’s production of Ken Ludwig’s film-set farce swirling around Max Reinhardt’s 1935 movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After all, that’s the modus operandi of Shakespeare’s comedy of mortal lovers manipulated by feuding fairies. And the "little western flower" figures prominently in the shenanigans of Ludwig’s farce as well. Unfortunately, as the besotted Veloudos evidently failed to discern, Shakespeare in Hollywood (which continues through June 4) is as lame as Tiny Tim.

Ludwig is the author of the successful backstage comedy Lend Me a Tenor, as well as the librettist of the retooled 1992 Gershwin hit Crazy for You. Shakespeare in Hollywood was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company, which declined to produce it; it had its world premiere instead at Washington’s Arena Stage in 2003. The screwball comedy, which introduces the "real" Oberon and Puck of Shakespeare’s play into the fray of the filming, with dramatis personae that also include "genius" Reinhardt, Warner Brother Jack, Production Code censor Will Hays, gossip maven Louella Parsons, and film stars Dick Powell, James Cagney, and Joe E. Brown, sounds promising. But the play lacks the anarchic logic of, say, Noises Off, which Veloudos directed last season. (It’s more akin to the Bible-pic dud Epic Proportions, which the Lyric also produced.) Worse, with its silly mélange of Hollywood fact and fiction mixed with indiscriminate borrowings from Shakespeare, Ludwig’s script just isn’t funny, even in an energetic production.

In Ludwig’s imagining, crass Jack Warner has been shanghai’d into making Reinhardt’s prestige picture because his New Yawk bimbo mistress, Lydia Lansing, wants to be in it. Done up in gold Elizabethan finery, Lydia plays Helena to the Hermia of Olivia Darnell (who doesn’t seem to have much to do with Olivia de Havilland, who was in the movie). And she provides one of Ludwig’s better bits, proudly demonstrating for an appalled Reinhardt that her lines make just as much sense when spoken backwards.

Filming is getting under way when the actors playing Oberon and Puck (Victor Jory and Mickey Rooney, who in fact did break a leg) fail to show up. Shakespeare’s Oberon and Puck, trying to find their way back to the Athenian wood following the triple nuptials that conclude A Midsummer Night’s Dream, instead materialize in that other repository of magic, transformation, and the ephemeral, Hollywood, where they get cast as themselves and attempt to fit in. Gossamer-silver-clad Oberon falls for Olivia; sprightly Puck goes Hollywood and starts chasing "hot chicks." (As in "braised poultry?" inquires Oberon.) Insulted by Hays, Oberon sends his amanuensis off for Cupid’s flower, which just about everyone in the show manages to stab into his or her eye; that leads to innumerable inappropriate attachments, several of which involve Joe E. Brown in his Thisby drag of blond braids and bosoms. In one of the play’s cleverer touches, Hays whips out a mirror and forms a narcissistic attachment to himself. As enacted by a thunderstruck Peter A. Carey, this is amusing until Ludwig mars it by taking the self-smitten censor on a quote-cribbing journey from Romeo to Viola to Macbeth.

The trouble is that most of the Shakespearean overlay makes no sense at all. If Oberon is the character from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as would seem to be Ludwig’s premise, why does he speak lines ranging from his own to Hamlet’s and Prospero’s? Is the playwright adding the King of the Fairies to the long line of folks hypothesized to have written Shakespeare’s plays? Not only is this device of stuffing random Shakespeare speeches into various characters’ mouths arbitrary, it more often than not falls flat. (As does such painful silliness as having Oberon, who knows nothing about America, refer to the author of Dream as a "cowardly Indian named Shaking Spear.") Apart from a few moments in which Oberon and Puck seem to bewitch the Hollywood mortals in the manner they do the Athenian ones in the Bard’s play, when a bit of magic hovers in the air (along with a bit of Mendelssohn), Shakespeare in Hollywood is more benumbing than bewitching.

This is not to say that it’s badly done. Janie E. Howland’s low-budget set (the money went into a 15-person cast) suggests more the whimsy than the excess of Hollywood. But Veloudos keeps things moving, and Christopher Chew, as Oberon giving up his mortal love, brings a note of melancholy to the play’s ending. Ilyse Robbins’s chipper Puck is certainly easier to endure than Rooney’s cackling boy goblin. Elizabeth Hayes makes a fast-talking yet period-innocent Olivia. And Caroline deLima gamely fills the petulant yet eager contours of iambically impaired Lydia. Maybe next time these people can be in a Shakespeare comedy — or at least Lend Me a Tenor.

Moving from Shakespeare to Tennyson, we find Zeitgeist Stage Company essaying Michael Hollinger’s ecological dust-up Tooth and Claw (at the Boston Center for the Arts through May 21), which takes its name from "In Memoriam." The play, however, quotes not the great 19th-century English poet but Darwin and Dr. Seuss, the latter’s One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (not to be confused with Hollinger’s own Red Herring) held up as a minimalist primer on evolution. And survival of the fittest is a subject dear to the play’s scientist characters, who are pitted against indigenous fishermen in this ambitious if somewhat stilted and clumsy Galápagos Islands–set drama.

The play, which premiered in Philadelphia in 2003 and was produced at New York’s Ensemble Studio Theater last year, is based on actual events in the 1990s. But Hollinger heaps everything from personal melodrama and genealogical whodunit to a Greek chorus onto the conflict between Charles Darwin Research Station scientists bent on saving from extinction the giant tortoises that are the Galápagos archipelago’s main eco-tourist attraction and Ecuadorian fishermen trying to ensure their own survival by harvesting the pepinos, or sea cucumbers, thought by the Japanese to be the Viagra capsules of the deep. After a prologue in which two members of Zeitgeist’s 10-person bi-lingual cast strap on guitars and perform Paul Simon’s Andean-derived "El cóndor pasa," the play begins with the arrival at the Research Station of Dr. Schuyler Baines, its newly appointed director. She doesn’t speak Spanish, though she tries, and when it comes to the welfare of the tortoises, she doesn’t speak compromise. This puts the young female scientist in direct conflict with the macho fishermen, who with their crude pepino processing are wreaking havoc with the islands’ delicate ecology.

Adding to the brouhaha are a gay Paraguayan scientist passed over for the directorship, a pregnant voice-of-the-people secretary who asks tough questions about why turtles are more important than humans, a local politico lighting a fire under the fishermen, and an elderly avian scholar in a skirt who’s given to stentorian pontification on simplicity and complexity, among other subjects — and who is Baines’s biological dad, though her recently deceased scientist mom never told her. A lot of the new director’s attention is focused on firing up famed Galápagos tortoise Lonesome George, the last of his Pinta Island kind, to sire some heirs. But gene spreading of the human variety is also on the table.

With so much going on, Tooth and Claw, though its sociopolitical and environmental issues are compelling, can become awkward — as can David J. Miller’s production. Huddled about a floor map of the Galápagos on which sit several stone tortoise "corrals" (Lonesome George’s glowing like a Native American sweat lodge), the staging, like the play, sometimes seems more intoned than alive.

Some of the supporting players — particularly Amar Srivastava as a threatening fisherman and Alejandro Simoes as a quietly angry one — give unaffected performances when they aren’t being forced into choral antics. Luis Negrón brings a relaxed if impassioned mien to the South American scientist sick of gringo imperialism, and Juan Luis Acevedo exhibits a troubled divided loyalty as the Research Station Mr. Fixit who is also the cousin of a fisherman. Lovely Nydia Calón, waddling on splayed, flip-flopped feet and sporting a beachball bun in the oven, homes in on secretary Ana’s pointed skepticism regarding the ruthless supremacy of science.

The principal characters, however, are made of tougher cardboard and sometimes speak like thematic fortune cookies. Lisa Morse, in her shorts and combat boots, is a likable Schuyler Baines, with a nice hint of little scientist lost about her. But she doesn’t bring sufficient flint to the bull-in-a-china-shop devotee of data. And Miller and actor Ed Peed go with the preening pomposity of grandfatherly Brit birdbrain Malcolm Geary rather than fight it, well, tooth and claw.