NEW YORK — The Royal Shakespeare Company doesn’t travel light. In mid-June a convoy of 46 shipping containers began to arrive at the Park Avenue Armory, having made the journey by truck and boat from Stratford-Upon-Avon to the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

One container was filled with flat-packed hoop skirts and World War I uniforms. Another held a life-size model of a wild boar and a 12-foot bear suit with glowing eyes. A third stored 20 wigs, 15 mustaches and several cans of litchis to serve as Gloucester’s savaged eyeballs in “King Lear.” But that was just for starters.

As it happens, the company also packed a million-dollar theater.

For its six-week stint at the armory, produced with the Lincoln Center Festival in association with Ohio State University, the company will perform five plays in repertory (as well as two plays for young audiences) on an almost exact replica of its new main stage in Stratford. Exploiting almost every inch of the Armory’s 65 feet of usable height, this three-tier auditorium seats 975 and boasts a thrust stage that extends far out into the audience, allowing for greater interplay between actors and spectators.

The portable theater’s ingenious design incorporates most of the shipping crates to raise and support the stage and to create a backstage storage area. The original Stratford stage took more than two years to build; the armory one must be assembled in just two weeks.

Why would the Royal Shakespeare Company, having only recently completed a major reconstruction of its home stage, want to travel some 3,500 miles with an enormous dismantled auditorium? “We’re off our tiny trolley,” said the company artistic director, Michael Boyd, speaking by telephone from Stratford. “We’re insane.”

Yet there’s method in his madness. Boyd, who took over the company in 2003 during a financial crisis and (according to many London critics) an aesthetic stasis, has reinvigorated it, in part by reviving the tradition of the long ensemble, a company of actors who sign contracts to work together for three years. As the current ensemble neared the end of its tenure, Boyd and Nigel Redden, the Lincoln Center Festival’s director, conceived of this summer season as a rare chance to flaunt the fruits of that sustained labor.

The Royal Shakespeare has played in New York before, but it has always relied on existing theaters, like the Brooklyn Academy of Music or a Broadway house. And with a slate that includes “As You Like It,” “Julius Caesar,” “King Lear,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “The Winter’s Tale,” it has never before brought so many plays at once.

The wardrobe mistress, Delfina Angioli, seemed unfazed by the chaos. “When it comes together, it’ll look really tidy,” she said. “It will look effortless.”