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A collaboration between actor/director Mark Rylance and Minnesota poet Louis Jenkins, Nice Fish has just one stage set: out on the ice.

Snow-swept vistas often have unreal, even surreal feelings. This is enriched by the wonderful words, acting and stagecraft of Nice Fish by Mark Rylance and Louis Jenkins now at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) in Cambridge.

A wonderful, comedic reverie set at an ice-fishing camp on a frozen lake in Minnesota, making use of Louis Jenkins’ delightful prose poetry, with existential overtones lurking around every hilarious corner.

“Nice Fish,” the unassumingly charming play now onstage at the American Repertory Theater, is tastefully hewn from the folksy prose poetry of Minnesota writer Louis Jenkins, whose kitchen-table ruminations about life in the upper Midwest must fit in just perfectly when he makes his periodic appearances on “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Imagine this: It’s January in Minnesota and you’re sitting on a frozen lake. There’s a hole cut in the ice in front of you. You drop a fishing line down into the frigid water below, and wait. And shiver. And wait. It’s unlikely you’re thinking to yourself, “Hey, this would make a great play.” That’s because you’re not Mark Rylance.

One of the world’s great Shakespearean actors reconnects with his youth on a frozen ice lake in his new play.

For Rylance, 55, much of the task as adapter has been figuring out how to link the poetry together to tell a story, set on a Minnesota lake on the last day of ice-fishing season. Connections between one poem and the next might be as small as a single word, or far more substantial. That crossed-out block of text was meant as a transition.

Here the world is a frozen lake in Minnesota towards the end of winter. Two friends, Erik (Jim Lichtscheidl) and Ron (Mark Rylance), have come together supposedly for an ice fishing expedition on the last day of the season.

If the homespun humor and quirky philosophizing that comes to you live from Lake Woebegone via A Prairie Home Companion warms you up on a cold winter’s night, then NICE FISH is your cup of cocoa.

Fishing – at least for those of us who aren’t Bassmasters – often has little to do with the actual catching of fish.

Playwright and actor Mark Rylance has turned the work of Minnesota-based poet Louis Jenkins into a 95-minute presentation at the A.R.T. in Nice Fish.