You don’t need me to tell you how good Seattle Shakespeare Co.’s production of Midsummer Night’s Dream (through November 13 at the Intiman; tickets) is. Broadway World calls it “HOT!” The Seattle Times rummages through its thesaurus for “phantasmagorical.” “Excellent and humorous,” says TeenTix. “Merely good,” qualifies The Stranger.

A recurring theme in most reviews is that there’s nothing mustily Elizabethan about this Sheila-Daniels-directed work; without making a “concept” out of it, Daniels has updated Midsummer‘s personality. The magical forest seems to hold refugees from Burning Man. The runaway lovers are looking for a place that will marry two women. Daniels lets the audience do the rest, form what connections it may, rather than offer a justification. That alone–devising a way to stage Shakespeare without baggage–makes the show stand out, even though it doesn’t have the acting firepower of SSC’s Hamlet.

This subtlety (to show, rather than tell) is backed up by set designs from Andrea Bryn Bush and costumes from Jennifer Zeyl–though Bush struggles to fill the Intiman stage on, I think, the SSC budget, you see enough to know what she’s after: knotted and gnarled trees, shadowy nooks and crannies. Zeyl’s “cloak” for Oberon is a masterstroke, a cross between a net and actual camouflage netting that turns Oberon into something misshapen, undefined, that your eyes can’t quite pick out. Ben Zamora’s lighting is a study in unsettling murk, and Robertson Witmer fills the air with strange voices and music.

The problem with Midsummer, in a way, is that you eventually have to leave the forest, and head back to squaresville (i.e., Athens). Again, very much like your time at Burning Man. Here, squaresville gains in stature, though, because that’s where Lysandra (Christine Marie Brown) and Hermia (Allison Strickland) would like to be married. It’s true that Daniels’ textual sex-change operation (Lysander to Lysandra) changes the play’s dynamics–Shakespeare was musing about the course of love, its fixations and inconstancy–but it pays off so well this way, you hear the play with fresh ears.

While the two are capable actors, I didn’t see that much chemistry between Strickland and Brown. Of the four young lovers, it’s Terri Weagant’s Helena who steals the show. I am a long-time Weagant booster–she’s hilarious, I love the way her voice cracks in self-doubt and disbelief at each new horror life has to offer, and her white-wine take (no caressing each syllable for an “Ah, Shakespeare!” epiphany). When Demetrius (the lanky, snappish Trick Danneker), ensorcelled, proclaims his love, you can tell Helena just can’t process this fresh horseshit.

Theseus (stern-yet-amiable Mike Dooly) and Hippolyta (a mostly line-less but assured Qadriyyah Shabazz) are the canoodling ruling-but-not-that-royal couple, but it’s the gang of “rude mechanicals” who tumble onto stage every so often that seem to have everything figured out. They don’t, of course, but this gang of amateur thespians is blessedly unaware of their limitations. Chief among them is Todd Jefferson Moore, in every way. His Nick Bottom is transcendent, but not immanent. Nothing remains within, all is spoken. It’s poetry.

Bottom’s ass-romance with Titania is the best thing about Amy Thone’s performance. Moore is literally chewing the scenery, but Thone has no trouble staying with him–her physicality is as expressive as anything she says. But you can see that Thone doesn’t have much investment in the fairy queen’s “humbling,” when Oberon (a compellingly offbeat Reginald Andre Jackson) *YOINKS* the child she was looking after away. What’s it all mean? I couldn’t see that anyone understood it. Jackson’s Oberon had a much tighter relationship with Puck (Chris Ensweiler), a yelping, echolalic, feral spirit who startled the crap out of the people he appeared in front of in the audience.

Ensweiler’s portrayal may be one of the best Pucks I’ve seen, and Puck is a much-trodden path. But usually you don’t think Puck would actually bite you, and here you do. Just as, generally, you don’t think a Shakespeare play will feel rough and wild (though it may act like it). When the fairies come out of the trees in this Midsummer, you shrink back a little, because they are not your friends.