The ridiculous gets the sublime once over as Buntport Theater Company performs its devilishly original play “The Roast Beef Situation,” through June 16.

The collaborative, idiosyncratic company (whose most recent show featured a Tommy Lee Jones puppet) has cooked up a fine slice of Commedia dell’Arte. The Italian-born, theatrical tradition gave audiences the sad fool Pierrot, his nemesis Harlequin as well as the bickering pair Punch and Judy to name but a few of the stock characters that populate the form.

The play’s goofy title gives a vigorous nod to just how absurd the law — especially in the hands of miscreant politicians — can become.

Based on a historical event, “Roast Beef” tells of the jailing of actor, dancer, clown Carlo Delpini in 1787. During a performance, Delpini (Brian Colonna) strays from a willfully sentimental ditty written by Henry Fielding about a cut of meat and utters two words without musical accompaniment.

You know actors and their disregard for hewing to the writer’s words, but the wrath wasn’t Fielding’s. Actors were prohibited from performing plays with spoken dialogue unless approved by the government.

Britain’s Licensing Act of 1737 granted the Lord Chamberlain the right to approve, or not, all plays with dialogue. (It wasn’t until a Parliamentary act in 1843 that this changed.) The act was a way to muzzle satirists and others craftily poking fun at politicians.

“The Roast Beef Situation” becomes fleet fun as Delpini and his cohort find themselves in the clink. With a little help from SamAnTha Schmitz’s spare lighting design, ensemble members Erin Rollman, Erik Edborg, Hannah Duggan and Evan Weismann play Delpini’s clown posse — Morey, Grub, Stan and Plausible Jack — as well as stand-ins for other characters in the tale’s priceless recounting.

Deliciously layered, “Roast Beef” is a romp with “meta” implications: about censorship as well as the role of the actor in society. It is silly and smart simultaneously. How often does a clown comedy send one on a quest to learn about Georgian-era jurisprudence?

The uses and abuses of laws and taxation are given a hard and hilarious gander. There’s even a bit of slapstick mischief around professional jealousy: Delpini is aggravated by Giuseppe Grimaldi’s popularity. After all, wasn’t it he, Delpini, who cast Grimaldi as Friday to his Robinson Crusoe in the pantomime performance on Drury Lane?

The laws regulating theater are so arcane and legion that Morey keeps them tucked away on a scroll, which is consulted again and again. This becomes just one example of the expert physical comedy buoying this linguistically nimble ride.

The costumes are impressively outlandish (when Grub portrays “the love interest,” his rump becomes a rack). So, too, are the variety of bald wigs. In addition to lights, Schmitz is also responsible for the sly sound design.

For those with Coulrophobia (a fear of clowns), Buntport’s troupe feels your pain. Or at least acknowledges your condition, even as they tease it boldly, brilliantly.

-Lisa Kennedy, June 1, 2012, Denver Post