Shakespeare's gone slap-happy

CAMBRIDGE -- Benjamin Evett, artistic director of Actors' Shakespeare Project, says in the program notes that his production of "Love's Labour's Lost" is "a refreshing sorbet" to end the company's heavy third season on a lighter note. That it is: fresh, sweet, and just cool enough through most of its length to prepare us for the sudden chill of mortality that Shakespeare introduces at the end.

This production, on a bare but festively lit stage in the same basement that felt tragically cavernous for the company's recent "Titus Andronicus," uses just six actors and a few trees (laden with wigs, hats, and other props for the actors to exchange with dizzying frequency) to tell the story of the king of Navarre, his vow with three friends to devote three years to study without seeing any women, and the inevitable disruption of that vow when the princess of France arrives with three comely ladies in tow. Add a pair of rustic lovers, a pompous schoolmaster and his foolish admirers, a preening Spanish knight, and a child who's the only sensible person onstage, and you've got the closest thing Shakespeare ever wrote to a Marx Brothers comedy.

Evett clearly has the Marxes in mind -- along with the Keystone Kops, Busby Berkeley , and, less felicitously, the brothers Stooge -- in some of his staging, with choreographer Kelli Edwards supplying vintage Hollywood chorus lines and slapstick routines that provide apt, if unexpected, counterpoint to Shakespeare's delirious flights of wordplay. In an early hangover scene, the physical comedy threatens to become too broad, but as the production moves along it gets lighter on its feet.

And, of course, it's hard for things to get too heavy when the actors are switching wigs and accents every few minutes. Half the fun is guessing how they'll manage to cover all the parts without missing a beat, and the game only gets giddier as it goes.

But the switcheroos would be a mere gimmick if the actors didn't also deliver real characterizations. Happily, Marianna Bassham makes a deliciously pert Rosaline, with the tartness of her wit only sharpened by its contrast with her dim goofiness as two different suitors, the courtly Dumaine and the rustic Costard. Sarah Newhouse, too, moves deftly from the princess's lofty grace to the maid Jacquenetta's trashier but no less self-assured coquetry.

Michael Forden Walker and Jason Bowen, meanwhile, make lovely ladies -- Bowen's demure Katharine is particularly amusing -- but their work as the king and Berowne, respectively, is less sharply drawn. Berowne, especially, needs more development than he gets here; his ultimate embrace of simple truths and honest emotions loses force because Bowen doesn't start off with enough sophisticated artifice. You have to put on a mask before you can strip it off.

Even so, you have to admire an actor who tackles both Berowne and Holofernes in a single night, and Bowen makes the bombastic scholar into a veritable hot-air balloon of puffed-up self-importance. His Holofernes is matched, bite for bite, in scenery chewing by the ecstatically over-the-top Don Armado of Johnny Lee Davenport, rolling his Rs up one side of his twirling mustachios and down the other.

In the midst of all this silliness, it's the kid who keeps his head -- and nearly steals the show. Khalil Flemming, who is 12, invests the young page Moth with a preternatural solemnity, a weary air of amusement at the follies of his elders, and a gift for ironic understatement that most adults can only dream of. Then, just as expertly, he switches gears in the pageant-within-a-play, creating a Young Hercules whose outrageously exaggerated snake-stomping routine would fit in nicely on "Wrestlemania."

The Huntington Theatre did "Love's Labour's Lost" at the end of last season with a bigger budget, a larger cast, and more elegant costumes. But with this play it's the spirit, not the surface, that really matters. And both that lovely large production and this small but sprightly one succeed because of their spirit: big-hearted, brimming with wit, and tinged with the quiet but sure knowledge that laughter doesn't last forever.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.