STRATFORD, Conn.--The Midsummer Night's Dream with which the American Shakespeare Festival has opened its thirteenth season is hardly a dream of a production. But then it is also far from being a midsummer nightmare--just a middlingly pleasant couple of hours.

Disappointment is strongest when I look back at the vibrant version that the late Jack Landau put together for the Festival in 1958. I had hoped that the new production would duplicate the virtues of the old; but it falls far short.

One cannot take the easy way out and put the blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings down to manual laborers. And on this work he lavished lots of his loveliest language.

(Ed. Note--"A Midsummer Night's Dream" plays through Sept. 10 in alternation with "The Merchant of Venice" and Anouilh's "Antigone," with "Macbeth" joining the repertory on July 25. The other productions will be reviewed in subsequent issues. The drive to the picturesque grounds on the Housatonic River takes about two and a half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpikle to Exist 32. Performances tend to begin promptly at 2:30 and 8:30 in the air-conditioned Festival Theatre, and wandering minstrels perform a half hour before curtain time. There are free facilities for picnickers on the grounds.)

No, the trouble lies elsewhere. And it is not difficult to surmise what happened. Cyril Ritchard is invited to play the rich comic part of Bottom the Weaver. Now you will recall that Bottom and his five fellow artisans are preparing to act out the tale of Pyramus and Thisby as part of the entertainment at the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. Bottom is assigned the role of Pyramus. Uncontent, he pleads, "Let me play the lion too." He is restricted to Pyramus, but the idea is planted.

The notion then goes from Ritchard's Bottom to his head. "I get to play Bottom and Pyramus," thinks Richard, "but why should I stop at two roles?" So he announces, "Let me play Oberon too--or methinks I won't play at all." Believing that a loaf and a half is better than none, the powers-that-be agree to pencil him in as king of the fairies too.

Ah, but there's one hitch. The doubling of Bottom and Oberon is quite possible--except for one critical scene well along in the play (IV, i), where Bottom, with his noggin transformed into an ass' head, and Oberon must both appear and speak on stage. We are told that Anthony of Padua, Philip Neri and other saints of eld were capable of bilocation. Are they now to be joined by Saint Cyril? The suspense is hardly bearable; and the answer turns out to be: yes, apparently. Bottom appears; yes, it's Ritchard's voice all right. Titaniz puts him to sleep. Oberon enters and does his stuff; Ritchard, unmistakabley. Bottom awakes, the ass' head comes off, and, sure enough, there's Ritchard, prattling away as nicely as you please about not knowing his ass from a mole in the ground.

I shan't reveal how it's done. Suffice it to say that we are the victim of an ingenious, even brilliant, stunt. But we are so concerned over the prestigiation and sleight-of-body that we can give no heed to the play. We have become watchers at a mere carnival side-show. The audience's natural reaction to all this is recounted at great and amusing length in Walter Kerr's review for the New York Times. As Keats did not quite say, "Was it aversion, or a waking Dream?" At any rate, as he did say, "Fled is that music."

Having answered, "Bottom, Bottom, who's got the Bottom?," we have not yet got to the bottom of the trouble. You will remember that Quince the Carpenter is the nominal director of the show that the artisans are readying, but that Bottom keeps trying to take over as boss himself. Rising to the bait again, Ritchard insists not only on playing three roles but also on directing the entire production. And he is allowed to have his way.

One could, I suppose, react to this doubling-in-brash approach as Doctor Johnson did to a woman's preaching and a dog's walking on his hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." The point, however, is that such theatrical vaunting should not be done at all; in fact, it should be categorically proscribed by international law.

The player of a leading stage role ougth never to be entrusted with the direction of the production. Never? Never! There is no qualifying Gilbert-and-Sullivan "well, hardly ever" about it. I don't care how gifted a person is in acting and directing; he should not be permitted to wear both hats at once. And this applies just as much to Olivier as to Ritchard. On occasion Olivier has achieved an impressive result with a work he has both supervised and acted in; but there have nonetheless always been flaws that a separate director could have corrected.

It ought to be obvious that a man playing a part cannot see his own performance as an audience does. Not only this, but he cannot adequately judge the performances of the other players with whom he is acting and (one hopes?) interacting on stage. A production needs to be seen as a whole; and this demands perspective and objectivity. It was for this reason that the job of directed evolved in the first place--and, analogously, that the orchestral conductor superseded the head-bobbing harpsichordist or violin list. Is the indulging of theatrical egotism and arrogance worth a return to the old-time lack of focus, balance, and precision? Both Sir Laurence and Saint Cyril should attend to wending their ways by mending their maze.

In the present instance, it should come as no surprise that Ritchard's Dream is diffuse and disoriented. It needed, and needs, a full-time director. As an actor, Ritchard does make a credible Oberon, imbuing him with a fitting amount of hauteur and mockery. His Bottom, though cockney, is not cocksure; it is too bland and superficial. This is a pity, for Bottom is the first of Shakespeare's great comic creations.

Of the rest of the "mechanicals," only Tom Aldridge's Quince emerges as a fully formed character. And when he delivers the prologue before the Pyramus playet, he has a grand time with the alliterative avalanche of b's. The other cronies are passable. The whole sextet of artisans is just no match for their counterparts in the 1958 production: Morris Carnovsky, Hiram Sherman, Ellis Rabb, William Hickey, Will Geer, and Severn Darden.

The current crop, though, does manage to bring to the Pyramus interlude a good deal of humor, albeit of a highly slapstick sort. Pyramus' whacking of Wall (Robert Frink) on the chest elicits a cloud of plaster dust. And when Thisby (Mylo Quam) says, "Come, trusty sword," she repeats the line, whereupon the "dead" Pyramus hands her his own sword, with which she then proceeds to stab herself with studied phoniness under the armpit. (Ritchard has, in fact, introduced throughout the whole show a lot of business straight out of vaudeville and the music-hall.)