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In the four years since he swapped the pastoral fields of Lancaster, PA (Amish country) for the fast track of big-city theatre (Broadway), Jonathan Groff has been at the vanguard of youthful revolution, a rebel with all kinds of causes, fighting The Good Fight in a host of different eras.

On and off and in workshop, his Spring Awakening lasted three and a half years — that's how long he and other overheated teens stormed the barricades of sexual repression in a provincial 19th-century German village, hammering away at starchy, chafing constraints with a rock score by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater.

Last year, after 500-plus performances on Broadway and nominations from the Tonys and the Drama Desk, he took his new and knowing ways to the Delacorte in the park, dovetailing smoothly and logically into the war-protesting flower children of the late '60s for a summer of Hair. Then, skipping its successful Broadway transfer, he cut that Hair short and extended his "Summer of Love" with his first film, Ang Lee's "Taking Woodstock," which opens on Aug. 28, just a few days after the 40th anniversary of the famous rock festival in upstate New York.

Now (Aug. 11–30), the well-traveled 24-year-old time-traveler finds himself back at the Delacorte, steeped in Greek mythology with The Bacchae, Euripides' classic 405 B.C. tragedy. He plays no less than the son of Zeus, Dionysus — but, because of mortality on his mother's side, he's not acknowledged as a god by his maternal relatives. In response, he gives them a lot of Greek-sized grief, with a little help from his fiends (a cult of female worshippers he has amassed called The Bacchantes).

The role fits right into his game plan: "Craig Lucas said to me recently, 'If you could pick anything to do next as an actor, what would you want to do?' I said, 'I'd like to do a classic piece of theatre and play a character who is, maybe, not so moral.'"

Presto! Dionysus, whose name is synonymous with wine-fueled revelry, showed up on his doorstep "two weeks later — literally. I started reading the script [translation by Nicholas Rudall], and my heart was beating so fast I thought it would pop out of my chest. I stopped immediately, went to Barnes & Noble and spent three hours reading Greek mythology so I'd know what was going on before I jumped into the script." He also did a weeklong "atmosphere soak" among the Grecian ruins before he joined Andre De Shields, Joan MacIntosh and Rocco Sisto in rehearsal. Continued...