DREAM 2026

Kate Twa’s original adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns to the South Okanagan this July, presented by Tempest Theatre. The play follows Shakespeare’s working-class characters as they refuse the comic subplot they were assigned and take on the entire Dream, only to find that the story they claimed has more to say about their own lives than they counted on. The performances are physical, funny, and fearless, and with only eighty seats per show, the audience is close enough to feel like they’re inside the story rather than watching it.

DREAM plays at two venues, both seating eighty. The Village Theatre at Van Westen Vineyards on the Naramata Bench is a 106-year-old building on the site where Carroll Aikins opened his Home Theatre in 1920; live theatre returns there for the first time in over a century.

Tempest Theatre in downtown Penticton is the company’s home stage, the room where the production was built. DREAM premiered in 2025 across four outdoor locations to enthusiastic audiences and returns in 2026 with a returning ensemble and two venues that give the production real atmosphere: a century-old cultural site hidden on the Naramata Bench and a beloved downtown black box theatre.

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been staged thousands of times. Most productions give you the version you expect: beautiful language, comfortable distance. Twa rebuilt the play from the ground up, keeping what makes Shakespeare’s writing extraordinary and bringing it into direct contact with how people actually live and speak now. The characters you thought you knew take the story into their own hands, and the play reshapes around them.

All ticket revenues go directly to the artists, production costs, and sustaining Tempest Theatre.