THEATER REVIEW : Cold ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ : Group Repertory Theatre offering of the Shakespeare comedy lacks a magical feel.

If they’re worried about stumbling while innovating, director Wendie Willson and actor Mary Ann Miller needn’t be concerned, on two scores: Willson’s Group Repertory Theatre staging of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is hardly the first version to play with gender-switching; in Miller’s case, an unengaging female Puck is also hardly new. When Kenneth Branagh brought his Renaissance Theatre Company to the Mark Taper Forum in 1990 for repertory stagings of “Dream” and “King Lear,” Emma Thompson proved that a woman can create as irritating a Puck as a man.

Miller isn’t quite as irritating as Thompson--no mucky, primeval wriggling around on the stage for this actor--but she is also not magical, which is a problem running through most of Miller’s “Dream.”

The place looks latent with magic, as long as the eye stays on the painted backdrop of lacy, African-like trees. But we’re supposed to be in Athens, Ohio , so the trees make no sense. Desma Murphy’s set also seems to imply that the action is in a park, therefore the picnic table and benches. But the jungle gym that Puck and Oberon (William A. McCoy) climb on looks like some Bauhaus erector set. Much as Jeff Brewer’s lighting, it casts a cold spell over what should be a transforming place.

Still, a cold “Dream” can work, as long as it does its transforming business, which is after all what the comedy is about. Certainly Peter Brook’s still-talked-about “Dream” was deliberately frigid, but it altered our perceptions by sheer stagecraft. Here, with the confused design, the transforming work is up to the actors.

The central plot is all set-up: Hermia (Whitney Vale) will marry the business-like Demetrius (Jeff Keel) or face banishment from Athens. The problem, naturally, is that she loves playful, impulsive Lysander (Mike E. Smith). Her best friend Helena (Pat Sturges) follows them all as they get lost in the Athenian woods, ruled by Titania (Kay Freeman) and Oberon, with loyal servant Puck at his side.

As is often the case with most stagings of “Dream,” the lovers’ quarrels come alive only later in the midsummer eve, while the amateur theater troupe led by Quince (Therese Lentz, in another gender-bender) and man-into-donkey Nick Bottom (Larry Eisenberg) gets much of the laughs. And yet Willson pulls off her most ferociously comic touches during the hair-pulling, gut-crunching lovers’ tussle.

If Miller’s Puck is a flat letdown (her lame attempts at audience participation only flatten things more), Sturges’ comic Helena provides unexpected mirth. Eisenberg doesn’t use Bottom as a typically scene-stealing vehicle, but he also doesn’t yet have a sense of comic direction with this loopiest of creatures. Freeman and McCoy’s doubling as Athenian and forest rulers is, like the whole show, a mixed blessing: Freeman is never sexily powerful as Titania, but McCoy always sounds in charge in either capacity.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Location: Group Repertory Theatre, 10900 Burbank Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays.

Cost: $8 to $10.

Call: (818) 769-7529 or (213) 660-8587.