WENATCHEE — Shakespeare outdoors demands a certain theatrical boom that 12-year-old Anthony Picarillo nailed last week.

“Boy, what sign is it when a man of GREAT spirit grows melancholy!” he said as he flung his arm to the heavens and took a giant step forward.

From his director’s chair, Rod Molzahn chuckled and praised the young actor’s volume.

“You know, I think people will be able to hear you in Quincy,” he said.

Volume is a must when you’re part of the Wells House Players, a summer troupe of about a dozen middle and high school students. The young thespians have been practicing “Love’s Labour’s Lost” — one of Shakespeare’s earliest — for the past three weeks in Washington Park. When the play debuts at Ohme Gardens on Monday, they’ll face sound-stealing breezes, airplanes overhead and the noise of a 200-person audience.

“I think clearly when Shakespeare wrote these plays, he was writing them in the context that they’d be outdoors,” Molzahn said during a rehearsal break last week. “The entire play takes place outside in a garden, in a park and so we have a perfect set. Why take a play like that and stick it inside and make a set that would look like the outdoors?”

The play starts with an oath of chastity and scholarship. The king and his three noble companions swear off love for three years, until a visit from a princess and her ladies-in-waiting complicates that promise.

“It just sort of ends up really funny, because everyone is really self-righteous, but me most of all,” said 16-year-old Hannah Segle, who plays school master Holofernes, who the king asks to entertain the ladies. She said it took a few reads to understand her character’s wearisome alliterations and highbrow babble, but now she loves the humor of him.

“At first, it’s kind of hard to pick up, but after seeing so much of it, it becomes a second language,” she said.

Picarillo relished playing the character of the fantastical Spaniard Don Adriano de Armado, a drama queen who pours on the Shakespearean flare extra-thick.

“He’s a big fan of big words just like I am,” Picarillo said. “He doesn’t know what half the words actually mean, but he does use them quite often.”

For example: “I spoke it, tender juvenile, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender.”

Translation: I called you a tender juvenile because you’re young.

“In Shakespeare, if you can do it in two words you can do it in 20,” Picarillo said.

Molzahn was performing as a one-man Shakespeare act when he founded the Wells House Players 16 years ago. Watching the young actors’ progress keeps him going year after year, he said. In the three weeks of rehearsal, they form tight-knit bonds with other students they might not meet otherwise. They pick up vocabulary, reading skills and later ace the Shakespeare unit in their English classes.

“And a lot of things start to happen that happen in any theater production,” Molzahn said. “They gain self-confidence, because they’re learning things they never thought they could do. They get exposed to this incredibly beautiful and funny language. They learn to appreciate a piece of art that they’ll appreciate for the rest of their lives.”

Rachel Schleif: 664-7139

schleif@wenatcheeworld.com