The Guthrie Theater has pulled out all the stops for Artistic Director Joe Dowling’s final, signature production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  Steampunk meets tribal costumes designed by the Tony Award-winning Ricardo Hernandez create a raw, majestic feel. The diverse dance and musical numbers throughout are dynamic.

Dowling and co-director David Bolger have kept things low to the ground, so to speak, though the effect remains dreamy, ethereal.  In fact, in what is a rare Guthrie company move, Midsummer audiences sit on the Wurtele Thrust theatre-in-the-round style stage itself, all but eliminating the barrier between actor and audience, fantasy and reality.

Twin Cities breakout star Tyler Michaelson is a natural Puck, the quintessentially peevish finagler who creeps along forest floors in search of mischief. But Michaelson has achieved something especially difficult in his performance; he’s tapped into a base, animalistic intuition and embodied a primitive, inertial physicality — no small feat for a character so often limited to a mere conniving flit of energy.

Together with the formidably beautiful Fairy Queen (Nike Kadri), towering Fairy King (Nicholas Carriere), and their respective fairy minions, Puck drove the show in a particularly musical direction.

Michaelson’s task of unleashing Puck’s body while sharpening his mind suggests, more generally, one of the greatest challenges to any director of Midsummer: balancing complexity and technical precision with a primitive spirit of myth and exciting chance. For this classical bewitching comedy, though it be magical,  is not simple. Between a foursome of young, tripped out lovers who’ve lost themselves to the nocturnal forces of the forest, a Fairy King and Queen’s epic contest for power, a pending nuptial between the Athenian Duke Theseus of Athens (Carriere) and the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta (Christina Acosta Robinson), and, finally,  a cast of bumbling play within a play actors, Midsummer. is. manic.