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Since he joined the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company in 2001, Christopher Guthrie has been in five different versions of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and the second time he’s been cast as Nick Bottom, the man who becomes a donkey and falls in love with a Fairy Queen.

The first time was under the direction of Giles Davies for  a Young Company production that toured area schools for 60 shows throughout the year.

“You get to know a play pretty well that way,” he said, “and I directed it the year after that.”

But, he said, he received the ultimate compliment that first year when Davies told him: “The Bottom you’ve created is quite an ass.”

“Bottom operates in a shame-free zone,” he said. “No matter what he’s doing, he comes at it 50 miles an hour. He’s sure he knows everything and  his 100 percent lack of doubt allows everything that happens to happen.”

As the sprite Puck, fourth-year company member Kelly Mengelkoch is playing one of her biggest roles.

“It takes a willingness to try anything and everything in rehearsal no matter how foolish it may feel,” she said about what makes a good Puck, “a complete willingness to trust the magic.”

The set features a wintry fairy world inhabited by members of the Exhale Dance Tribe playing the fairies. The Fairy King and Queen (Mark Douglas-Jones and Sherman Fracher) have a dispute that leads to chaos in the human world and she falls under a spell to fall in love with the first creature she sees. After Puck transforms Bottom in his donkey costume into a real donkey, he awakens the queen from her sleep and she falls in love with Bottom the ass.

“The heart and soul of the play is love and comedy,” Guthrie said. “The characters are so weird and wacky that it sets the stage for both slapstick and honest comedy.”