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Kate Twa has spent years thinking about Shakespeare, and why his work became something people feel they need permission to enjoy. The plays were originally written for everyone in the room, not just the educated seats. Somewhere along the way, the work got handed to institutions that turned it into something careful and distant, an artefact to be studied rather than a story to be felt. Twa wanted to undo that.

Her way in was the mechanicals. In the original play, they’re tradespeople who put on a terrible version of Pyramus and Thisbe for the court’s amusement. They exist to be laughed at. In Twa’s adaptation, Bottom convinces the troupe to take on the whole Dream, not just the small play assigned to them. What follows is a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dreamwhere the people who build things and fix things and figure things out are running the show. They play the lovers. They play the fairies. They take Shakespeare’s verse into their mouths alongside Twa’s contemporary dialogue, language that shares the DNA of the original but sounds like people you’d actually know.

The ensemble returning for 2026 proved themselves across four outdoor venues in the summer of 2025, moving between classical text and new writing in the same breath, shifting between multiple characters, and bringing electric energy to the stage. 

The Village Theatre at Van Westen Vineyards sits on land with a theatrical history most people in the Okanagan don’t know about, and which we’re honoured to explore and connect with. In 1920, Carroll Aikins built a purpose-designed performance space on his family’s fruit orchard in Naramata, convinced that serious theatre could thrive outside the cities. Prime Minister Arthur Meighen even travelled to the site and opened it on November 3, 1920. Vincent Massey, the future Governor General, called it the most significant theatre in Canada. It closed in 1922 and the site has been quiet ever since. DREAM brings live performance back to that ground for the first time in over a century.