Let’s start with the changeling boy, a tiny yet crucial entry point into Daniel Sullivan’s strange and superb telling of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” easily the most thrilling Shakespeare in the Park production in a decade.

Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen at the center of the play’s bafflements, have reached an impasse over custody of a changeling child, “stol’n from an Indian king.” Some directors show this beguiling “young squire” and some don’t, but while his age is never given, current interpretations typically present him as old enough to hold an erotic allure for both fairies. Mr. Sullivan, a gifted director whose works (including “Proof” and “Intimate Apparel”) have traditionally painted within the lines, makes it clear that the changeling boy is a true babe in the woods: His Titania (Laila Robins) and her coterie of fairies transport him in a large Victorian pram.

Fast-forward, however, to the famous transformation of Bottom (Jay O. Sanders, showing some of Kevin Kline’s canny blend of self-awareness and exhibitionistic joy), one of the “rude mechanicals” who have convened in the forest to rehearse a play, into a donkey. Titania, whom Oberon (Keith David) has charmed into falling in love with the (literally) pompous ass, regales her whinnying beau with promises of various woodland delicacies. While doing so, she jams a bottle of honey into Bottom’s mouth and shoves him into that same pram before whisking him away for some interspecies intercourse. Thus, not only is the changeling boy suddenly eroticized, but this has happened via a bit of sexual role-playing. Mr. Sullivan, albeit with his customary discipline, is suddenly scribbling outside the lines — and creating every bit as hypnotic a picture.

Several comparably perverse moments surface throughout this “Midsummer,” casting a welcome shiver of ambivalence through a comedy that is often reduced to he-loves-me-not titters or dour treatises on sexual violence. And yet, owing in no small part to wonderfully nuanced performances by a younger generation of actors led by Martha Plimpton, the laughs come with heartening regularity. By creating such provocative shadows, Mr. Sullivan sees to it that Shakespeare’s glimmers of light shine all the brighter.

Just as Peter Brook’s legendary 1970 production drew upon juggling, trapeze work, and other circus skills, Mr. Sullivan has turned his Puck (Jon Michael Hill) into a sleight-of-hand man, brimming with flashy bits of magic. But while Mr. Brook set these delights in an all-white box, this “Midsummer” revels in the Delacorte Theater’s sylvan setting: Set designer Eugene Lee has placed a large tree at the center of the stage, and the fairies dart up, down, and around its branches with the mastery of a people completely at peace with nature. It is no accident, surely, that Bottom topples from said tree immediately after reverting to human form.

First, however, come the dour scenes at the palace of Theseus (an understated Daniel Oreskes), before Shakespeare lets his imagination run wild in the nearby woods. (“Midsummer” is one of his very few plays not to stem from pre-existing source material.) Hermia (Mireille Enos), facing death at the hand of her own father for choosing Lysander (Austin Lysy) over a preselected suitor, demetrius (Elliot Villar), conspires to elope with Lysander. but helena (Martha Plimpton), hermia’s best friend, spills the beans to her beloved demetrius, and after they give chase, all four become the increasingly bewildered pawns of Puck and Oberon’s spells, falling in and out of love with terrifying speed.

The company, made up of proven stage veterans as opposed to transplanted hollywood talent (Tim blake nelson, as the rude mechanicals’ hapless impresario Peter Quince, is a welcome exception), achieves a unity of style and a comfort level with the text that is all too rarely in evidence at the delacorte. The energy level flags only with a protracted chorale at the finale. but after the rustics have unveiled their uproariously awful take on “Pyramus and Thisbe” — the prologue alone is funnier than some entire “Midsummer” stagings i’ve seen — this extended coda cannot help but pale in comparison.

Ms. Plimpton has evolved into one of the new York stage’s most intriguing and emotionally transparent young performers; what begins merely as helena’s abject masochism (“use me but as your spaniel,” she begs demetrius) builds into a compelling blend of confusion, long-suppressed passion, anger, and relief as both men turn their attentions toward her. And while helena is the most interesting of the four lovers, Ms. Plimpton is nearly matched by Mr. Lysy’s foppish earnestness, Ms. Enos’s delicious slow burn, and, to a lesser degree, Mr. V illar’s impetuous attentions.

This is to say nothing of the delightfully spooky, Edward goreystyle fairy children. Or Mr. Sullivan’s gift at illuminating the more peripheral characters without pulling focus from the central action. Or the unexpected depths of compassion from hippolyta (Opal Alladin), Theseus’s Amazonian bride-to-be. Or costume designer Ann hould-Ward’s witty riffs on Victorian finery. Or the sight of Ms. robins, so often cast as a frigid beauty, letting her hair down and serenading her long-eared lover. Or the … but why go on? The dusky pleasures of this “Midsummer” deserve to be experienced firsthand, with the excitement and foreboding one feels upon roaming through a rapidly darkening forest. When hippolyta recounts a similarly uncanny experience in the Cretan woods, she exclaims, “I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” For two more weeks, such sounds are on offer nightly in Central Park.

Until September 9 (Central Park, enter at 80th Street, 212-539-8750).