In the New Village Arts’ production of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, all’s well that ends well. Which is to say that Act 2 is stronger than Act 1.

In NVA’s (uncredited) fast-moving adaptation, we plunge immediately into the heart of the piece, which is the confusion created by two sets of twins, one set born of the merchant class, the other of servants. Separated at birth, the merchant class twins are each named Antipholus (Max Macke and John DeCarlo), and the servants are both named Dromio (Kyle Lucy and Adam Brick). The set that lived in Syracuse has gone off to find their lost siblings, and when they did not return, their father, Egeon (Jack Missett), set off to find them. All three land in Ephesus, a city where Syracuseans face death if captured.

Suddenly, the boys from Syracuse find themselves being confronted by people who claim to know them but whom they do not know. But, they play along anyway, with the confusion becoming deeper and more comical until the twins finally meet and sort things out.

In the meantime, the mistaken identities are prime fodder for farce, and the play's material has been adapted time and again, arguably the most famous being Rogers and Hart’s musical, The Boys from Syracuse.

If the old saw, “Dying is easy; comedy is hard,” is true, then farce is next to impossible, because it’s comedy that relies on intricate physical timing. When it’s good, and North Coast Rep’s Lend Me a Tenor last year was an example of farce that didn’t miss a beat, it’s terrific. But, those beats are pretty easy to miss.

The Carlsbad troupe had to stretch itself to its limits for this show. Everyone in the company (save Kelly Iverson, who’s appearing at Cygnet) is either onstage or doing double duty backstage, and even so a couple of non-company members fill out the 14-member cast. Some of the kids are involved too: members of NVA’s junior ensemble rotate through the bit part of the messenger, and Jonah Gercke, a company member who can’t be more than 13-years-old, plays Angelo, the goldsmith (quite convincingly).

Even Chris Renda, the company’s lighting designer, makes his acting debut as Balthasar, Angelo’s buddy. But, to pull it off the script had to be trimmed to the point of eliminating characters (Luce, the household cook who is also sometimes confused with a similar-looking person, is discussed but never seen, for example.)

Mostly, it works, particularly in Act 2, where the mania overcomes all logic and everyone, including the audience, is having a ball. Act 1, however, is more problematic.

Company member Justin Lang makes his directing debut with this show, and he’s tried the device of setting it as an early 1950s Hollywood sitcom. But he really doesn’t follow his device far enough, and it gets lost. Tim Wallace’s set sort-of looks like a series of studio facades, and his sound design evokes radio serial dramas (radio?), but the major reminders of the device are that the characters keep getting their make-up touched up on stage and a stage manager (Dana Case) counts down the start of various scenes.

I suspect that Mr. Lang wanted the kind of comic confusion that characterized a lot of TV in that era (I Love Lucy being the most famous example), but he hasn’t inserted a sufficient number of homages to those iconic shows for the audience to grasp the connections.Mr. Lang has also made the rookie error of over-directing, that is specifying what he wanted in too precise movements and vocal qualities.

For example, in Act 1, sometimes one character’s movements are shadowed by another character. I was sure the effect was supposed to be a comic one, but it served only to upstage the actor being shadowed. And some of the actors (Kristianne Kurner, as Adriana, and Amanda Sitton as her sister, Luciana, being prime examples) seemed to have been encouraged to overplay their roles, resulting in the sort of double-bind that Edward Albee epitomized when he had Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf exclaim, “I do not bray” (rent the film sometime and watch the late Elizabeth Taylor bray exquisitely as she says this line).

In Act 2, everyone gets into the groove. Manny Fernandes sets the tone in particular with a slyly clever performance as Duke Solinus, who finds he needs to sort out the confusion and in the process violate his laws about death to Syracuseans, but the entire company is chugging away, and the TV sitcom device goes out the window entirely as Dana Case stops playing the stage manager and takes up the key late-appearing role of Emilia, the Lady Abbess.

But, everything gets worked out, and the company can smile and bow knowing they've given their audience a pleasant two hours of diversion. See, it's true that all’s well that ends well. And you don’t even need to “brush up your Shakespeare” to enjoy it.

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