The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, heralded as “Shakespeare’s American home,” branched out to the eighteenth century this fall season with their production of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773). At Blackfriars Playhouse, the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s original indoor theater, the ASC prides itself on recreating the staging conditions of Renaissance drama. Pursuant to their stated commitment of connecting the texts of early modern plays to modern audiences, however, Blackfriars performances also often abound in playful anachronism. In their interpretation of She Stoops, Goldsmith’s words are inflected with air quotes, southern drawls, and at least one “amiright??” The play opens with Benjamin Curns and Allison Glenzer (Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle) coming out on stage, in costume (beautiful eighteenth-century fashions designed by Victoria Depew) except for the absence of Hardcastle’s wig, and announcing that the American Shakespeare Center is celebrating its 25th anniversary fall season; the announcement ends with Curns popping open a Coors Lite can while the two bicker like the married couple they play in She Stoops. This jovial mixture of in-character and out-of-character, of period garb and modern affect, sets the tone for the rest of the production. Goldsmith’s comedy, which was a hit from its opening night in 1773, remains one of the very few eighteenth-century plays to be performed regularly for modern audiences. Director Jim Warren admirably fulfills Goldsmith’s prescription that comedy be “perfectly satirical yet perfectly good-natured” with a production that captures the goodwill of its audience from the start.

Goldsmith’s plot is a delightfully simple one of mistaken identity. Charles Marlow and his friend George Hastings venture into the country from London to visit the Hardcastle estate, where they expect to meet their potential lovers. Along the way, however, a prank causes them to mistake the Hardcastle mansion for a public inn; while Hastings quickly learns his error, he colludes to keep Marlow in the dark because of a particular difficulty his friend has in addressing himself to respectable women. Among women of the lower sort, Marlow has no such hang ups, and lovely Kate Hardcastle decides to take advantage of his mistake by impersonating a barmaid in order to get him to loosen up a bit. Goldsmith intended his “laughing comedy” to combat the “mawkish drab” of the sentimentals that were so popular at the time, with a return to more bawdy, “low” forms of humor that harken back to Restoration comedy. Warren retains that spirit in his rollicking, energetic, irreverent production. Goldsmith’s audiences would not have recognized the original song that Tony Lumpkin sings at his pub haunt, the Three Pigeons, which was rewritten for this production and prominently features the words “beer” and “ass.” The saucy ditty is reprised several times during the play, and its hard-driving, hand-clapping beat belies its rather downcast lyrics: “I hate your face and this hell of a place, but it’s better than drinking alone.” The play concludes with this message and a dance to the same tune.

It is a production in which the audience’s pleasure unapologetically takes center stage. During intermissions, the ASC follows the Shakespearean model of having musicians play live music from the balcony; they update the tunes, however, from Shakespeare’s day. In the She Stoops intermission, actors crowded the balcony along with a cello, violin, banjo, guitar, snare drum, and clarinets to perform Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” and a delightfully rousing “Bohemian Rhapsody.” These luxuriantly crowd-pleasing elements of the production can sometimes seem to verge on pandering. Yet, Warren’s decisions in this regard also astutely perform the main preoccupations of Goldsmith’s play. The constant permeability during the production between actor and audience, and between faithful adherence to Goldsmith’s script and modern relevance, dramatize the concerns that appear in She Stoops about the porousness between insides and outsides, public and private. Moreover, it is the ASC’s very commitment to recreating the conditions of early modern drama that allows for these anachronistic elements to be naturalized within the space of the play. Early modern theater mostly operated under the understanding that, as the ASC puts it, “the play always spoke to the present,” and thus for the ASC, the script is not a sacred object, nor is the stage a hallowed space. Their productions thereby avoid falling into the trap of many modern interpretations of early plays, which impose a sleek but ill-fitting dress on the original text without theorizing the adaptation beyond a gimmick.

Among other early modern staging conditions, the ASC replicates universal house lighting that allows for a degree of audience-actor interaction mostly unknown to modern drama. It is largely through this good-natured interaction that ASC productions maintain their friendly energy. Chairs are set on the edges of the stage itself from which audience members can watch the play, and the border that usually divides the actors from the audience thus becomes a space of interpenetration. In She Stoops, audience members momentarily become a part of the play during the brief moments in which an actress falls into the lap of an audience member, or an actor looks meaningfully at certain audience members while reciting strictures on the female sex. The most extended moment of this kind occurs during the climactic scene in which Mrs. Hardcastle mistakenly reads Hastings’s letter to Lumpkin planning his intended escape with Constance Neville. Choked with rage, Glenzer recruits a baffled audience member to read aloud the coup de grace, the part of the letter in which Hastings refers to her as “the hag.” The momentary pause in an otherwise brisk production, which ensues as a result of the audience member’s temporary confusion about what she was supposed to do, provides a space of reflection that calls attention to the acts of reading and misreading that are so central to the play.

Mrs. Hardcastle gets hold of the letter in the first place because Lumpkin’s near illiteracy causes him to need an interpreter: as he says, “I can read the outside of my letters, where my own name is, well enough. But when I come to open it, it’s all—buzz.” This anxiety about the ability to read outsides not necessarily corresponding to an ability to read insides is the conflict at the center of the play. The comedy relies on Hardcastle’s and Marlow’s simultaneous misreadings of the other, and Marlow’s misreading of Kate, stemming from the circumstances that make the Hardcastles’ private home indistinguishable from a public inn. The signs that should distinguish the two are constantly confused, and every action is open to misinterpretation: Hardcastle’s awkwardness in entertaining, his servants’ obtrusiveness and inexperience attending guests, the decline in the establishment of the landed gentry that led to old mansion houses being converted into inns, all allow for the acts of mistaken identity on which the plot turns.

The permeability of Warren’s production also mimics the play’s concern with character, a word that is punned on in Goldsmith’s text in all its eighteenth-century implications. Goldsmith is writing in a world of Lockean empiricism, which challenges the idea of innate characteristics and asserts that character is something that is written on the mind from the outside world through the senses. The problem in Goldsmith’s play is that outward signs and actions are not an appropriate measure by which to judge of a person’s character. Kate defends Marlow’s unprepossessing first impression by arguing, “there may be many good qualities under that first appearance;” her father’s tart retort, however, is that Kate is only struck by Marlow’s good looks and thus irrationally extrapolates to inner qualities: “when a girl finds a fellow’s outside to her taste, she then sets about guessing the rest of his furniture.” The play’s set—a minimalist one featuring only a sofa, sideboard, table, and chair—contributes to the sense that outside trappings can easily be combined in different elements to get entirely different interiors.

A production of She Stoops accordingly requires a Marlow capable of fulfilling both Hardcastle’s and Kate’s impressions of his character, and Gregory Jon Phelps plays his part of boots-on-table insolence as convincingly as that of eyes-averted timidity. Meanwhile, Lee Fitzpatrick brings a Lucille Ball-like zaniness to Kate, never so evident as in the scene in which she first attempts to pass herself off as a barmaid to Marlow. Warren elaborates, almost to the point of extravagance, on the play’s suggestion that Kate’s ability to mimic “the true bar cant” is less than masterly. In this scene, Fitzpatrick’s Kate tries on dozens of different accents from all over time and space, switching almost every line but consistently loud and gratingly bad. The scene becomes almost painful to hear, and Warren denies any relief to his actors or the audience for long minutes, while Fitzpatrick impressively keeps up the energy through the sheer force of her voice. The vertiginous switchback of accents induces whiplash, but the scene astutely performs the play’s worry that we are incapable of deducing character from external signs. Marlow displays no recognition of Kate’s total inability to stay in character and incorporates all her actions, inconsistent as they may be, into the persona that he has created for her.

After this tour de force, the show seems almost to tire of this pair, and the play loses its momentum in the subsequent scenes in which Marlow declares his affections for barmaid-Kate and then promises to leave her out of respect for her virtue. These interactions veer dangerously close to the mawkishly sentimental, and the words are spoken without the power to move. This is all the more unfortunate because the play thus misses the opportunity to highlight one of Goldsmith’s best jokes about character: Marlow declares that he is bewitched by barmaid-Kate’s supposed “simplicity” of character—yet the audience knows that at the very moment when she appears most transparent and beyond artifice, Kate is actually acting an entirely different part. The actors seem to totally miss this irony and speak the words merely as if they are eager to get back to the funny bits.

By Goldsmith’s time, British writers had long been proud of their sense of the British national character as a country full of different characters. Everything from the climate to the liberty of the laws was supposed to make Britain a nation that exhibited human nature in its greatest profusion of forms and thus cultivated writers particularly suited to “characteristic writings.” Warren’s production appropriately delights in the eccentricities of its cast of characters. When Marlow is initially surprised by what he sees as Hardcastle’s impertinent freedom for an innkeeper, he allows, “he’s a character, and I’ll humor him a little,” and indeed, Curns brings an endearing, Wallace Shawn-like quirkiness to Hardcastle, a character in danger of being played as merely an old-fashioned bore. Mrs. Hardcastle’s character takes on much of the play’s physical comedy, and Glenzer elicits roars from the audience with nothing more than a particular set of her facial features in scenes like the one in which she appears after being dragged through a horse pond. John Harrell is eminently likable as a bounding, boisterous, and rather sardonic Lumpkin. At the same time, Dylan Paul and Emily Brown as the more staid Hastings and Constance do an equally solid of denying idiosyncrasies in favor of total conservation of character.

David Garrick’s original prologue for She Stoops laments that the “comic muse, long sick, is now a-dying!” Warren, however, follows the tradition developed in She Stoops productions of writing their own prologues to the play, and his invokes the ghost of the author rather than the muse. And indeed, exiting the theater still grinning, I felt that the ASC had brilliantly summoned Goldsmith’s genial satire into 2013.

She Stoops to Conquer at the American Shakespeare Center runs until November 29.