There is a bright purity in the elegant fantasy now at the La Jolla Playhouse, based on Carlo Gozzi’s 18th century confection “The Love of Three Oranges,” which both pricks the imagination and cleans out some accumulated grime of pretentious naturalism.

While there’s plenty of visual mystery to savor in the exotic stagecraft of Romania’s Nona Ciobanu and Iulian Baltatescu _ who between them did sets, costumes, lighting, music, adaptation and staging _ it’s the comfortable fairy-tale environment of the ancient commedia dell’ arte plots and shtick that grants permission to enjoy the tricks.

Borrowing is endemic here: Gozzi stole freely from Persian folklore and a stage tradition already ancient when he wrote his play in 1761. Ciobanu juggled chunks of Gozzi for this version, a prize-winner around Europe for the last decade. Baltatescu lifted useful music from Fellini films and Kletzmer tradition. And James Magruder, in an easy-going English adaptation that manages to be tough, gleeful and modest, further transformed the material. And, in the very best commedia tradition, a handsome and droll cast make it all their own through hands-on improvisation inside Ciobanu’s benevolent direction.

What, then, is on the stage of the Mandell Weiss Forum through Oct. 17?

Mainly a vast, yellowish cloth drop of something like gauze of jersey which can be pulled tight against protrusions to create effects arguably more eerie than any electronic morphing. Somebody flies, seeming to skip up the drop, to exquisite effect. Pods of the same material roll out from under the Mother Drop and turn into costumed actors. In fact, virtually every scrap of material onstage, except decorative details, is this same yellow stretch stuff.

Actors can be faceless forms in a crowd one second and distinctive individuals the next, simply by maneuvering their outfits. This makes for a fast, seamless unfolding of the story which greases its old joints and renders it child-like rather than childish, a piquant mixture of worldly innocence and vulgar excess.

(Story? Oh, the Prince of Lugubrio is sick from melancholy and must be cured by being moved to laugh. The witch gets the laugh but in turn enchants the boy into a quest for three enchanted oranges. Things turn out well. OK?)

This is far too much an ensemble show to single out individual actors. Everybody did well and there was a general sense that all nine of them could trade parts at random and do just as well. Believe me, please, that’s a compliment.