I had been summoned by a friend, but chanced upon the play. How could I not notice sheets strung as stage curtains across a back yard, people arriving with food, four girls sitting in a canoe and someone in a bicycle helmet about to make an entrance. “What’s going on up the street?” I demanded of Mary.

“Bard in the Yard,” she replied. “Stacy and Robin are staging a play at next door at Ed and Cori’s.” As if this was commonplace for her street.

We missed Act I which added yet another dimension to watching a group of adults and four children perform a backyard version of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The performance definitely had the quality of a dream in which so many things make no sense at all. Why the canoe? What to make of the soundtrack choices (“We Are the Champions”) or the mix of costumes that ranged from bathing suit to pantaloons, from the look of early Athens to REI mountain climber? Occasional bursts of monologue from one of Shakespeare’s dramas?

It mattered not. What mattered was that in a backyard in Ballard on a Sunday afternoon there were at least 50 people, of all ages, laughing, often inexplicably, other times simultaneously. I learned the cast had gathered earlier in the day for the first and only rehearsal. Everyone had been instructed to bring their own costume, there would be a potluck following and there was fierce competition to win the coveted William Shatner overacting award.

Rain threatened briefly but that danger passed as the play within the play unfolded and Pyramus died, and died, and died again on the back steps of her next door neighbor’s accommodating deck. A pink-wigged spirit heckled the proceedings from a platform in a tree and there was much cross-dressing. After a seventh inning stretch for all the comedy drew to a close (“No epilogue, I pray you”) and there was general dancing and bestowing of dahlia bouquets to the youngest cast members by neighbors Mary and Joseph.

Then in a glorious reversal all the players revealed themselves as the friends and neighbors, parents, colleagues and grandparents of their everyday lives. The dramatic Queen of the Fairies, Titania, became a man in neatly trimmed beard. The spirit invited everyone to the potluck table. The grandfather, pressed into an emergency role of Lion, became Stacy’s father again. But Hermia, although revealed to be Robin who along with his wife Stacy did the casting and direction seemed destined to stay Hermia, in wig and a tennis outfit.

It wasn’t until I spoke to Stacy a few days after the performance that I learned the theme was the Olympics, with everyone outfitted as though for a specific sport. The Bard in the Yard was transplanted to Ballard this year by way of ten years on Vashon, with origins in Chicago. When friends Tom and Claudia GrossShafer on Vashon took a break Stacy and Robin Evans-Agnew knew they had to bring Bard in the Yard to Ballard.

Stacy Evans-Agnew, a teacher at Seattle’s Waldorf School, and her husband Robin first met at an audition back in college. He got the part and she called to ask him out. They plan to make “Bard in the Yard” an annual tradition with a special performance next year for their 20th wedding anniversary. Their daughters were also in the play making it a full family affair.

Stacy cast the parts in advance. With the exception of one cancellation everyone appeared on Sunday morning. As Stacy said of preparing for the play, “They hadn’t seen it. They hadn’t done it. Most people hadn’t even read the script.” The hours flew by before the audience was due to arrive; the first rehearsal was barely completed before it was time for the actors to don their costumes. No time for stage fright, but then again, the back deck made for a comforting set and the trees were a perfect double for “wood nearby” of Athens.

Although overacting was the rule rather than the exception, winners for the William Shatner award were finally announced: a tie between Cori’s Oberon and John Marino’s Rocky Horror Show meets Titania. Then, shed of their wigs and tennis rackets, the scripts they had been clutching since morning, the friends continued their revels on a street in Ballard-Upon-Avon.