'Dream' scenes

The read-through

"Now, fair Hippolyta," Nic Few began, and the first read-through of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" got underway, the actors' yellow highlighters making a hushed skritch as they marked their lines. Seated around the circle of nine tables was an unusual combo of younger and older players, each group watching the other with keen attention.

This "Midsummer" is a showcase for a new generation of actors, some barely out of college, cast as main characters for a 10-week run on the Guthrie's thrust stage. They read their lines with a calculated verve, as if determined to make William Shakespeare sound as natural as Ryan Seacrest.

Guthrie regulars -- Wingert, Yoakam, Iglewski, Fuller -- watched with expressions that were encouraging and sometimes pensive. Their bit -- a play within the play -- was introduced in Act 1, Scene II. Within a minute, the mood shifted. The air in the rehearsal room seemed lighter, brighter, and not just because they had funny lines. These veterans made Shakespeare seem ... effortless.

By Act III, with Stephen Pelinski and Jim Lichtscheidl flinging lines like vaudeville veterans, the watching Fairies were, quite out of character, laughing uproariously. By the time Sally Wingert expertly mimed holding a boisterous dog on a leash, the difference between present and future -- of reach and of grasp -- was made startlingly, inspiringly, clear.

The director

"The forest is malignant," Joe Dowling said. Never mind that "A Midsummer Night's Dream" sounds like a confection, or that the plot, with its mismatched lovers and a man-as-ass, suggests slapstick. What's overlooked, Dowling said, is the threat of rape, a father's sentence of death on his daughter, a bosom friend's betrayal and a duel of bloodlust.

Hoo-kay then. Maybe the play is not as romantic as centuries have led us to believe, and Dowling's vision is less radical than it first appears. "The things that happen in the forest are not funny," he said. "They're painful, and carry far more serious consequences to their sexuality." The play, he said, is about "the dark night of the soul called adolescence, of what it is to grow up."

Dowling has staged the play 10 times, the last at the Guthrie in 1997, when it was boffo box office, sold out every night. The 2008 version has familiar elements, but important shifts in emphasis reference a world since Sept. 11, a nation at war, a planet in peril. Titania's speech mourning the state of the Earth "could be given in the 21st century by Al Gore," Dowling said.

Some of the actors wear military uniforms, and the forest floor reverberates with the Pentagon's camouflage. These production numbers have hip-hop riffs. One character scrolls away on a laptop.

Is it possible to go too far? Dowling waved off the question.

"The language always brings you back."

The words

"Run," Andrew Wade whispered, and Few sped across the room, crouched and said a line. "Run," whispered Wade, the voice and language coach. Again the strides, the crouch, the line. "Run." "Run." "Run" -- until Few, winded, breathed the last line.

Shakespeare once implored actors to speak his speech "trippingly on the tongue." This was about 400 years ago, long before "Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue's sweet air more tunable than a lark to a shepherd's ear" might be recast as "You look awesome."

Wade is here to help the actors make Elizabethan rhythms accessible to modern ears. Few once had a speech impediment so severe that people would ask him to write things down. One of his first stage roles was as a lamb in a Nativity play. "I just had to 'baa.' ''

Now Few is playing the double role of Theseus and Oberon, "my first huge gig outside of school." At sea about a lengthy speech, the towering actor sought help from the almost elfin Wade. "I feel like I need to keep the ball in the air, but it just ... " The speak-run-speak gambit was Wade's way of prodding Few to start afresh with each line.

In Shakespeare, Wade said, there's a great temptation to make it make sense, to make it sound like chatter at Starbucks. Few confessed as much, saying he'd initially tried to make his lines sound casual, "and that's pretty much not the way to go," he said, laughing. "It's easy to get lulled into the iambic pentameter. But the words will rest on me more comfortably if I am giving them their time, their full sound, their full value."

An actor has to rely on Shakespeare's language being greater than the sum of its lines. "There is so much in the music of it," Wade said. "You can trust it to make sense."

The bold idea

"In 1962, when I was a sophomore in college," Ken Washington said, "I was in a small group of students, about half of us African-American and half white, who were brought to the Twin Cities to spend the summer together." It was a bold idea, the students unlikely to have hung out with each other in the South, "but we were lifted up out of there."

Washington, now the Guthrie's director of company development, said one field trip was to a Guthrie play. It was an experience he'd never imagined, in a summer he never forgot.

Washington's job is the result of another bold idea, a partnership between the Guthrie and the University of Minnesota that emerged a dozen years ago. It was the first such department of its kind, now replicated by other theaters and universities. He travels the country, seeking out young actors for A Guthrie Experience for Actors in Training, a summer program, and the bachelor of fine arts Actor Training Program, a four-year liberal arts program for select students. Ideally, they'll form a bond with the theater, and with Minnesota.

"To be able to bring other young people to experience this theater and this city means a lot to me," Washington said. "That's when I'm hit most deeply about it."

"Midsummer" features Guthrie Experience alumni Few, Emily Swallow, Erin Cherry and Randy Reyes. Actors from the BFA program are Jonas Goslow, Ian Holcomb, Kathryn Lawrey, Valeri Mudek, Mike Rasmussen, John Skelley, Namir Smallwood, William Sturdivant and Brandon Weinbrenner.

The details

"With cunning thou hast filched my daughter's heart," Egeus fumed at Lysander, ripping a locket from Hermia's neck and flinging it at her lover, only to see it winging off into the second row of seats. "Sorry about that," actor Nathaniel Fuller said sheepishly. "It caught on my finger."

From the top: Bluster, fling, and this time the locket skidded offstage, sending Lysander scrambling down the steps to retrieve it.

From the top: Bluster, fling, and this time the necklace landed OK, but as Lysander held it, the locket fell off, clattering onto the floor.

"I broke it, huh?" Fuller said. The cast cracked up. Egeus ended up dialing back the fatherly fury to seething disdain, merely casting the locket at Lysander's feet.

A play can come together or fall to pieces over such details. Everything -- everything -- gets considered, debated, decided.

In the shop, wigmaster Ivy Loughborough asked that every other sequin in a small pattern on fairy Erin Cherry's forehead be taken off, the initial design being "too much." Costume designer Paul Tazewell roughed up the feathers embellishing Brandon Weinbrenner's mohawk, "fuzzing them a bit." The eyeliner of choice? Cover Girl Perfect Point Plus.

In the rehearsal rooms, scenes were broken down into slim fractions of action. "Should I do a windup sound?" asked Kathryn Lawrey as Hermia, contemplating how to punch out her two suitors. She giggled: "I mean, I don't know how to fight." (Answer: No.)

Marcela Lorca, the movement director, changed Puck's flight from Oberon into more of a zig-zag than a dash, then shifted Oberon's expression from vexed to amused at such mischieviouness. Every motion, every gesture must have its reason.

Some motivations, though, are slam dunks, such as the inspiration for the salt-of-the-earth peasants' hometown: "It may call itself Athens," Dowling said, "but it's really Fridley."

The fairies

"I feel like a Ghostbuster and a Ninja Turtle and an X-Man all wrapped up in one," said Mike Rasmussen, harnessed and pumped about his first session learning to fly from the rafters. "Dude, I'm a superhero."

Aerial coach Joel Harris looked at him with a level gaze: "You're a fairy."

The irrepressible Rasmussen would not be stifled: "You see 'Lord of the Rings?' That elf was bad-ass."

"He was a fairy."

Then Rasmussen relented, but only just: "OK, I'm a sexually pleasing fairy superhero."

No kidding. In Dowling's malignant forest, fairy queen Titania's attendants (and personal gigolos) look like punk rockers with Maori tattoos and prodigious codpieces. Their costumes are suggestions -- they were advised to hit the gym as soon as they were cast -- although the black bras were nixed in the final week of rehearsals.

With all this attitude, Harris' need for sober attention became a slightly more challenging task. "We're going to be having you check each other, and as many times as we can," he said, tugging on each harness. "I don't want you to trust just one thing. You want to trust two."

He admonished them to think about how to brake and belay, not just onstage, but while eating, showering, in their dreams. They would control their descent by grasping the tail of the rope. "Never let go with that hand," Harris said. "Never ever. Never let go. Ever."

The fairies -- even Rasmussen -- quietly nodded. It was starting to sink in. In so many ways, they were about to take flight.

Finally, an audience

Last Saturday, Dowling walked out to explain the audience's role at this, the first preview. The play still is a work in progress, he said, and its reactions would help refine it up to opening night. Thus enlisted as allies, the audience settled in, few realizing that the play had not yet gone off without a hitch.

Rehearsals had been challenging, partly because of the production's ambitions, partly because in the midst of it all, Dowling received word of his mother's death, causing him to return to Ireland for a week.

On this night, though, the audience witnessed how the show's big idea could bear fruit. Reyes had been one of the early alumni of A Guthrie Experience. Here cast as Francis Flute, the bellows-mender, he was the relative youngster among the seasoned actors performing the play within the play. On the page, his part had few lines, yet Reyes' performance nearly stole the show, demonstrating that youth, well-served, will rise to the occasion.

As, on cue, did the audience.

Kim Ode • 612-673-7185