Instead of trying out the first-date stuff with Ms. Ashford, he has looked to Shakespeare’s language. “The emotionality of it really gets me and makes it really easy,” he said. “When you have these beautiful speeches about how devoted I am to the beauty of your eyes and all, I could almost do it to a rock.”

“I’ll be your rock, baby,” Ms. Ashford said, unoffended.

For her part, she is grateful that she’s had weeks of rehearsal with Mr. Hernandez. She spent several years on the Showtime series “Masters of Sex,” where, she said, actors would often introduce themselves in the morning and by afternoon “we’d see them having a tryst without any clothes on except for a sock.”

“So we are really lucky here,” she added.

While Ms. Grant and Mr. Beltran began to practice their kisses early on, the better to establish the intimacy between a longtime couple like Hermia and Lysander, Ms. Ashford made Mr. Hernandez wait until a full run-through to try out the kiss between Helena and Demetrius. “I’ve been waiting to get down with him maybe my whole life,” Ms. Ashford said, speaking for her character, “so it made sense to just sort of wait. It’s a whopper of a kiss.”

Kissing is a reminder of how strange and funny it is that actors’ bodies have to substitute for the bodies of their characters. It’s maybe even funnier for Ms. Ashford, whose real-life husband, Joe Tapper, whom she thinks of when a scene needs “more crackle,” is also in “Midsummer,” playing one of the Rude Mechanicals. (He, too, is a little in love with Mr. Hernandez, Ms. Ashford said teasingly. “He is astounded by your physique, as we all are,” she said.)

But the actors are clear about drawing distinctions between performance and life. Ms. Grant believes in “really healthy, strong boundaries,” she said, and as Mr. Hernandez put it: “This is literally my job. I went to school for it. I’m not skeezing on anybody. It is in the text.” No carnal appetite here.

And yet they have to make audiences feel otherwise, which means substitutions and tricks and what-ifs to sell what Mr. Hernandez calls “unadulterated, family-friendly passion.” At the end of the play, which culminates in that triple wedding, Mr. Beltran, who is unmarried, thinks about “what it would be like to have this moment.” In that scene Mr. Hernandez, also unmarried, feels “really like beautifully nervous, and awkward and wonderful,” he said. “Playing pretend, you get a second of the real emotion.”