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do you think fairies play a provocative role in shakespeare's midsummer night's dream?

Samuel Johnson stated this about Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream": It is wild and fantastical.

The language, action, characterization, and imagery of the fairy world combine to create a festival atmosphere in the play. In Elizabethan times, the festival was a special period when normal social customs were relaxed or reversed--like modern Mardi Gras in new Orleans.

The spring festival, like the ancient saturnalia, releases energies and transformative powers that are necessary for procreation and social renewal, but are ultimately controlled within the formal bonds of marriage.

Shakespeare's dramatic art, in similar fashion, conjures up and gives civilizing shape to the passions. The fairy world and its resulting plot in the play creates a framework within which release and transformation can occur.  

Oberon plays the role of deus ex machina in the play, providing the means for resolving the dilemma of the mismatched lovers. Titania offers Shakespeare the opportunity to display his skill in creating fantastic, gorgeous description, similar to Mercutio's Queen Mab speech and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Puck is part of the comic relief. Elizabethan audiences would have been enchanted by all the supernatural activity.

Of course they do.  Otherwise, they wouldn't be there.  It is a dream sequence, yet without Oberon, Titania, and Puck, all the craziness in the woods with Lysander, Hermia, Helena, and Demetrius wouldn't get so out of hand.  There wouldn't be a Bottom with a bottom for a head if Oberon hadn't played a trick on Titania.  They are integral and without them, there wouldn't be a play at all.