Editor’s Note: This preview of the Olney Theatre Center’s Summer Shakespeare Festival comes to us from Missy Frederick, who has joined our staff to write about theater.

DCist appreciates, heck, even admires the egalitarian nature of the annual Shakespeare Theatre Free For All’s ticket giveaway madness that went down last month. The getting up early, the waiting in line for hours, then the returning to the amphitheater well in advance of curtain time only to wait in another long line for a chance to elbow your way down to the best seats. It’s a pain, to be sure, but as you look around at all the other poor souls participating in the same mass ritual, you feel a real sense of accomplishment, and more than a faint sense of camaraderie with everyone else who managed to successfully navigate the entire process. You’re willing to suffer for Shakespeare. You earned this.

So it is with a mix of excitement and trepidation that we welcome back Olney Theatre Center to the realm of free summertime Shakespeare in DC. The Center is breaking in its brand-spanking-new Root Family Stage at Will’s Place with its Summer Shakespeare Festival, featuring a free outdoor production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” through July 3. Shows run each night, including this evening, beginning at 8 p.m., and yes, feel free to show up at 6:30 with a picnic, blanket and/or lawn chairs. But here’s the rub: all you have to do to guarantee yourself a spot on the grass is call and make a reservation. It’s madness. (301) 924-3400.

So if soliloquies and fairy queens are more your scene than burgers and barbeques, you’ve got an insanely easy option this Fourth of July weekend. You just have to trek a few extra miles to get there – the theater is located in Olney (which is north of Silver Spring and Wheaton), 1.5 miles east of Georgia Avenue and two miles west of New Hampshire Avenue. The website lists directions from DC, MD and northern VA. DCist hasn’t seen this production, so we can’t tell you how it stacks up against the Shakespeare Theatre’s fantastic recent rendition of the same play. You’d think with two local theatres offering free Shakespeare, they’d manage to stage different plays, but we’re not ones to stick our noses up at free Shakespeare in any form. If you manage to catch both, let us know how Olney’s staging compares to the Free For All version (and also how the Root Family Stage at Will’s Place looks).