Good Night Gamm gets bawdy with the Bard BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

A Shakespeare comedy is like a favorite dirty joke. You know every lewd turn that’s coming, but you don’t know what fresh twists and embellishments this new teller is going to come up with on the way to the payoff. Twelfth Night (through December 18) is The Aristocrats among the Bard’s knee-slappers, and the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre ensemble delivers it like a bunch of after-hours comics backstage at Catch a Rising Star trying to outdo one another.

Per usual for Shakespeare, things open with a shipwreck that allows parted siblings to eventually be misidentified. It’s a kind of "a guy walks into a bar " setup that he used at least four other times, by an informal fingertip count. Viola (Karen Carpenter), dressed as a boy, has hardly dried off before she is pressed into service by Duke Orsino (Scott Winters) to woo on his behalf Olivia (Jeanine Kane), who has been mourning her brother’s death. In turn, Viola — going by the name Cesario — thinks her brother Sebastian (Steve Kidd) has drowned.

It’s slow going through most of the first half, as everyone gets into their proper place and ludicrous situation. But director Tony Estrella starts off imaginatively. A nightclub setting fits the tone of Orsino’s opening line — "If music be the food of love, play on." Casey Seymour Kim is a chanteuse warbling a torch song, when the woozy Duke, untied bowtie dangling, takes to the keyboard to shift the tone darkly toward an Elizabethan "Melancholy Baby."

One good touch with the surrogate courtship by Cesario/Viola is that while Carpenter certainly is a beautiful young woman, her angular face butches up nicely with close-cropped slicked-back hair and a half-Windsor tie. (David T. Howard’s elegant costume design maintains a smart-set ambience even without martini glasses.) The action picks up like a bomb has gone off when Olivia declares her love for Cesario on their second meeting, the mourner in black now burst into emerald green satin like a piping hot one-woman Irish wake.

Once the Twelfth Night plot is eventually cranked up, this production gets barreling along like a clown car cresting a hill. Flailing about are a band of troublemakers: the hapless Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Jim O’Brien), the drunken Sir Toby Belch (Chris Byrnes), the enabler Fabian (John Morman), the bawdy wench Maria (Wendy Overly) and, leading the pack, the count’s jester, Feste (Casey Seymour Kim).

Their main prank is the centerpiece of this comic buffet. They contrive to have the woodenly humorless steward, Malvolio (Sam Babbitt), find a forged love letter to him, ostensibly from Olivia, his employer. Yes, this is that comedy where the sober servant is tricked into wearing hideous yellow stockings, fancily "cross-gartered." In a routine we wouldn’t have patience for on Comedy Central, Shakespeare describes in detail what’s going to happen — three times — then tells us how we are going to react. And yet the sight gag is inevitably entertaining. Babbitt makes a meal out of one morsel: practicing the smile that he believes has been requested, making the effort seem like bench pressing twice his weight. Very funny.

Speaking of which, I’ve never seen a better Feste than Kim’s. An actor needs to make a jester seem intelligent for us to appreciate the job. Kim goes further and lets us watch gears meshing, revealing thought processes several times a sentence. And that’s all before the broad stuff. Capering around a blindfolded Malvolio in prison, where he is manacled for being diabolically possessed, Kim plays a fire-and-brimstone preacher having a conversation with herself as a calm Feste.

We would have settled for the prior fun of the above conspirators exorcising him with the aid of a rosary, garlic, and a mallet and wooden stake. The farcical contingent doesn’t get lines or shtick as funny as Feste’s, but collectively they accomplish plenty of comical heavy lifting. Thanks to Bill Wieters’s set design, at a couple of points they peek out of back wall openings as though on The Gong Show.

For modern audiences, Shakespeare’s comedies require lots of humorous visual aids to make sense through the archaic language (not to mention the lame patches). Director Estrella and the Gamm troupe have gone beyond making sure to mime all the dirty stuff. The inventions are constant. For example, when Olivia is momentarily puzzled that Cesario/Viola is taller than he should be (since it’s actually brother Sebastian), she doesn’t miss a beat — she hops onto a platform while matter-of-factly continuing the conversation.

Way to go, Gamm!