Performance: The Bard, with a bite

It's getting harder and harder for actor Charles Numrich, who is playing Julius Caesar in parks around the Twin Cities this month, to die onstage at night. It's not just the physical rigors of falling down and making it look realistic when you are 65 with creaky bones.

It's also the battery of irregular occupational hazards: rocks, holes, mounds and sticks onto which an actor might fall while playing an ever-changing series of makeshift stages.

"A coward dies a thousand deaths but the brave die but once," Numrich said recently, quoting a line from "Julius Caesar." "At the rate I'm going, it'll be easier to die for real than to play-die onstage."

For theater artists, working outdoors in the summertime offers special thrills and unexpected spills. The shows, performed for free but with a hat passed at the end, are an ad hoc part of the cultural menu of theater in Twin Cities.

"When all the elements come together, it can be magical like nothing else," said Randy Reyes, who is co-directing "Twelfth Night" in a sit-down production in Powderhorn Park.

"When we're in the park, in this huge expanse and atmosphere, you get a sense of the bigness of Shakespeare in particular -- the poetry about the heavens and the Earth and the woods. Everything gets grounded and magnified in a new way."

"Twelfth Night" is the third outdoor show Reyes is directing, all under the banner of the Strange Capers, a company with strong ties to the Guthrie Theater/University of Minnesota BFA program. Last year he staged "A Midsummer Night's Dream," also in Powderhorn Park. Two years ago he directed "As You Like It" on Boom Island.

Outdoor performances give audiences permission to be interactive sometimes. Bad guys Cassius and Brutus "have gotten a lot of boos," said Numrich. "That's when you know that you're hitting it."

The plays have all been condensed. And actors in the area's outdoor shows are not amplified. "When the wind is blowing against you, you really have to throw your voice out there," Numrich said. Another thing: There are no dressing rooms, per se.

"When we first started, we would string curtains between trees and the wind would just blow them away," said Helen Donnay, with a laugh. She's a board member of Cromulent Shakespeare Company, which has done outdoor shows, including "Julius Caesar," annually since its founding in 1996.

Reyes said that when he first directed with Strange Capers two years ago, his actors would look like they were doing something illicit. "They would go behind trees to change," he said. Now, the company has a tent for a dressing room.

"What we've learned is to keep everything as simple as possible," he said. "People are coming to be grabbed by the language and the physicality. They are open to it. And when we have nearly 300 people sitting around the actors in the park, it's a beautiful experience."