Elm Shakespeare Puts The ​“D” In ​“Adieu”

“Can you shriek, please, when he touches you on the head?”

“Your ​‘eeeeeeik’ has got to be higher when he gooses you.”

“Can you roll the ​‘r” in ​‘Rude, hard-handed men?”

And ​“if you don’t have an urgency to your speaking, we are not urgent, as an audience. You’ve got to need to say it.”

Those were some of the final notes that legendary Shakespeare director Tina Packer gave to the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as they rehearsed the bard’s early comic masterpiece beneath a blazing sun at Edgerton Park Tuesday afternoon.

Elm Shakespeare Company’s annual free summer production runs in the park on Whitney Avenue at the New Haven-Hamden border starting this Thursday, Aug. 18, through Sept. 4 at 8 p.m.

It will be the first time in a generation that the play will not be directed by Jim Andreassi, who, along with his wife and company co-founder Margaret, turned the reins over to Rebecca Goodheart last year.

Since Goodheart is learning the ropes as the combined artistic and administrative director of the company, she invited her mentor Packer to be the primary helmsperson of the first production in the post-Andreassi era, although Goodheart has rehearsed some of the actors herself as well.

Can Elm Shakespeare Lovers expect to see a different take on Shakespeare’s early comic masterpiece? That’s the question I put to Packer between the run through and the note-giving session.

“It’s continuing Andreassi and maybe expanding on it,” Packer answered.

Those devotees of the summer productions know that an Andreassi Brutus or a Macbeth was crisply spoken, big, and physical.

That in part is because Andreassi not only studied with Packer at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, he also appeared in at least three of the productions she has staged there since Packer founded the group, with a focus on Shakespeare’s language in all its fullness, back in 1978.

Packer means a lot more than making sure her actors put the ​“d” in every ​“adieu,” as she counseled Mustardseed and several of the other fairies Tuesday afternoon.

It’s at the heart of what she has expressed in her books, such as Women of Will, as a ​“visceral” experience of Shakespeare’s language.

“Language is central to Shakespeare’s expression. It comes first and physical action is next,” Packer said.

“It’s more to do with how you use language. English [when Shakespeare was alive] was a very new language and they used the whole of their bodies. We use only our throat as opposed to the whole of the body,” she added. She urged the performers, in the note-taking session, to remember their ​“acting-shmacting” — the physicality that could help convey the meaning of the words.

That’s why she urged her actors to shriek when they were goosed, and also to make sure that if they were being chased, as happens to fairies, mechanicals, and especially the pairs of lovers in this play’s non-stop send-up of playful coupling, that the audience — even those in the back row — knew that you knew why you were being chased. Or as she put it in a tough note to one of the actors: ​“Don’t stand there as if a director told you to go there!” They needed to have a reason.

That certainly was the point that Michael Toomey, Packer’s fight coordinator, made as he elaborated on the Packer method.

“Shakespeare [the man] is dead. There are just words on the page until these people, these actors and their bodies, come together to interact with the text,” he said.

Toomey is associated with The Humanist Project in New York City and the Connecticut-based Split Knuckle Theater, which also has deep interest in physicality. ​“The end product is the interaction of 30 people with the text,” he said.

If Packer sounds like a tough taskmaster, that was not what long-time Elm Shakespeare Company actor and one of the company’s teaching artists Jeremy Funke heard during the note session.

Funke, who plays the charming bellows-mender Flute, doubling as Thisbe, called Packer’s notes more than appropriate. ​“She has a good sense of prioritizing, of knowing what’s appropriate at different stages [of rehearsing],” he said.

“We work in concentric circles. The closer we get to performance, the more we work on the details. The attention to detail is exactly where we should be at this stage,” he added.

It would also be a mistake to think, as I did when I first began reading about Packer’s language-based method, that there’s anything boringly purist about the attention to Shakespeare’s words. If anything, the excavation of the text, by evidence of the run-through of the play, has made it a downright hoot, with lots of chasing and running, using the park setting — its bushes, lawns, and trees — for racing and frolicking. Also, when the wonderful Bottom, played by Rafael Massie, plays a character who dies in the play’s play-within-a-play, the death is repeated, Groundhog Day style, by sword, long and short, by poison, by hanging, and even by electrocution by a toaster.

Was this too much of a departure from the text?

Packer answered by quoting a line from the play-within-a-play scene in Hamlet: “‘Let the clowns do no more than is set down for them. Which is an in-house joke because if they did a successful scene they wouldn’t stop, like stand up comedians. So we’re following the Elizabethan practice.”

The cast members, who had experienced the scene many times and knew what was coming, still all broke out into laughter.

My guess is you will too, in what promises to be a Shakespeare time-travel-through-language adventure.

Elm Shakespeare Company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs at Edgerton Park, 75 Cliff St., Aug. 18 – 21, 23 – 28, 30 – 31, and Sept. 1 – 4. All shows are at 8 p.m. and are free.