The new production by Hawaii Repertory Theatre works best when we forget it's a stage play and begin to believe it's a spontaneous way of life for three actors. All good ensemble productions create a similar reality, but this one dissolves nearly all conventions.

"The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" bubbles over the stage, into the audience and beyond. It has a script, reducing Shakespeare plays to snippets of comic parody, but the actors use their real names and — while they don't truly play themselves — develop a performance persona that is part improvisation and part rampant clowning around.

The mix also includes audience participation and local, topical references. For instance, an actor who bolts from the theater in terror of playing Hamlet is later explained to have been found hiding out at the dock, waiting to board the Hawaii Superferry. "He didn't know ..." is the melancholy comment.

In tone, the show still has the fresh, zany quality it surely enjoyed when Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield first produced it at the 1987 Edinburg Fringe Festival. It went on to a nine-year run in London and has had a couple of Hawai'i productions before this.

For Hawaii Repertory Theatre, the honors go to Jordan Savusa, R. Kevin Garcia Doyle and Paul T. Mitri (who also directs). The trio definitely clicks, with Mitri as the linchpin in a series of hysterical heroines in bad wigs who throw up into the audience.

Savusa is drafted to play Othello because he's "the closest to it," coming from Samoa — mistakenly identified as "that big island off the coast of Africa where the meerkats live." Doyle is the reluctant Hamlet, so ambivalent toward the role that he gives up big chunks of it to anyone willing to take over as the hesitant Dane.

The show claims to include all of Shakespeare's plays and the program provides a 37-title checklist, but it does cut some corners. All the comedies, for example, are reduced to a single sketch, since Shakespeare "always recycled their plots, anyway."

History plays become a game of football, using the British Crown as the prize, with a penalty imposed for introducing the fictional character of King Lear. And Shakespeare's bloody "Titus Andronicus" — filled with severed heads and hands — is blissfully presented as a bloody cooking show.

"Othello" is a rap song and "Macbeth" is a collection of dissonant Scottish accents. Most attention in "Romeo and Juliet" is on poison and sharp weapons.

The overlooked "Hamlet" comes in for special treatment and constitutes the entire second act.

Responding to obvious pressure not to repeat or disappoint, "Hamlet" does the play-within-a-play with hand puppets and examines Ophelia's inner turmoil by dividing the audience to represent her Freudian id, ego and superego. "Cut the crap, Hamlet. My biological clock is ticking and I want babies now!"

They then run the entire second act again in fast-forward and one more time backwards.

The production succeeds through its fast pace and live comic impudence. Still, it sometimes forgets when to "fold them and walk away." The fun slumps during a filmed sequence, and the "outtakes" following the curtain call read as a self-indulgent home movie, delaying the audience when it is ready to go home.