'Ladies Man' has some fun with adapted farces

Jonathan Croy and Elizabeth Aspenlieder play doctor and patient in the belle epoque comedy. (Kevin Sprague)

LENOX - In marital farce as in marital happiness, it's probably best not to inquire too deeply into the causes of success or failure. Laughter, like joy, rises most naturally when it's neither analyzed nor sought.

But critics, unlike other theatergoers, by definition criticize, and so they're perhaps at a disadvantage when faced with farce (to say nothing of happiness). How can you just let go and have a good time when you're constantly trying to decide exactly how good a time you're having?

Of course, if you're having a great time, such questions never even come up: You're too busy laughing to wonder why, at least until the next morning. But in the midst of a merely solid good time, such as the current production of "The Ladies Man" at Shakespeare & Company, it's all too easy to stop laughing and start thinking.

Charles Morey, artistic director of Salt Lake City's Pioneer Theatre Company, adapted "The Ladies Man" from two farces by Georges Feydeau; it contains large chunks of "Tailleur des dames," or "The Ladies' Dressmaker" (rarely performed in English), along with snippets of the better-known "A Flea in Her Ear" (which Berkshire audiences will have a chance to see in Williamstown later this summer). As you might expect with such a belle epoque pedigree, it also contains plenty of slamming doors, double entendres, stock characters, and absurd misunderstandings.

What it doesn't contain, particularly, is the essential lightness of spirit that makes the best farces zip along like a single well-told joke. Here the humor is just a little too labored, the characters and their crossed wires just a little too predictable, and the whole thing just a little too long and lumbering ever to rise to the level of divine fizz.

Even so, there are enough giggles and gags along the way to make for an adequately entertaining evening. If the doctor at the center of all the fuss is played a little too stolidly by Jonathan Croy, he's surrounded by a merry band of clowns to lighten things up whenever they appear: Michael F. Toomey as an unwittingly intrusive patient with an unfortunate lisp, Elizabeth Aspenlieder as a randy young wife who'd like more than the usual exam from her doctor, and, especially, Dave Demke as Dr. Molineaux's harried manservant, Etienne.

Annette Miller also pumps up the hilarity whenever she looms in one of the doorways (designed with swoopy Art Nouveau expertise by Carl Sprague) as the terrifying mother-in-law who, by no accident, is nicknamed Medusa. Miller's complete seriousness and hauteur is just what this gorgon requires in order to be truly hilarious - and costume designer Govane Lohbauer ices the cake with a particularly snakey-looking bit of millinery.

On the other hand, the stock, stiff Prussian officer (the suspicious husband of Aspenlieder's character) soon loses his charm; fractured syntax is only funny for so long, especially with an extreme accent - however expertly played by Walton Wilson. Speaking of accents, it's a puzzlement why Etienne and his fellow servant speak English with a heavy French veneer (except for an unaccountable moment when Demke lapses into upper-class Brit), while their equally Francophone employers get along fine without "zese" and "zose."

That choice, along with a few extravagantly underlined moments of physical comedy, suggests the presence of too heavy a directorial hand. Kevin G. Coleman might have served his cast better by pushing them less to extremes. In farce, as in life, sometimes it's best just to let the laughter flow.

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