Alex Mills as Puck. Photo by Ray Gniewek.

The hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiills are aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive in Synetic Theater’s nonverbal, nonstop production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream!

Okay, so maybe not the hills, but certainly the forest prowled by Alex Mills’s supple and lupine mischief-maker, Robin Goodfellow. Upholstered in ghostly blue fur and forever coiling his spine in ways that will make any chiropractors in the house see dollar signs, he’s the best thing about this fourth Synetic Shakespeare adaptation, sans verse, sans words, sans speech, sans — well, yes, pretty much everything that makes the bard The Bard, you know?

There’s something innately perverse about doing Shakespeare mute. We all know he appropriated his plots from elsewhere, but we remember them as his because he elevated them with poetry that still enchants four centuries later. I didn’t see Synetic’s prior, verbiage-free versions of Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, or Hamlet. Performing the latter — a relentlessly cerebral, psychologically meticulous work — without words seems particularly impossible. Apparently, they pulled it off, though. Reviewing Hamlet: The Rest Is Silence for the Washington Post in April 2002, William Triplett called it “easily the most daring and innovative piece of theater seen on a Washington stage in a long time.”