As an avid follower and historian of Northeast Ohio theater, I can comfortably state that one of this year's most stirring romantic dramas played itself out last Thursday at Cleveland State University's Factory Theatre. It occurred at the opening of the second season of the CSU Drama Department's noble experiment labeled Summer Stages. This is an attempt to replicate for the benefit of students and local theater habitues a miniaturized variation of a Shaw Festival-style repertory theater.

Placed in the front row for public adulation were the university's regal old guard. In attendance was Joe Garry, the ever-dapper auteur of Cleveland's legendary Jacques Brel, seated next to his far larger-than-life muse and companion David O. Frazier. To their right: our most cherished and beatific joint acting institution, Dorothy and Reuben Silver. And to complete the eccentric grandeur was the presence of venerable designer and puppeteer Eugene Hare.

On stage, one of our newer veterans, Scott Plate, paid heartfelt tribute to what was and what hopefully will be. He extolled the lofty goals of the ambitious Summer Stages company of old pros and enthused theater students, coalescing to revivify a program that had become a desert.

The event was equal parts ribbon-cutting, passion play and Capra-corn. For our de rigueur hero we have to cast Michael L. Mauldin, director of CSU's dramatic arts program. Aspiring to be a combination Moses, Gerald Freedman and Sir John Gielgud, he's performing much the same services for nascent thespians as Victoria Bussert is doing for Broadway musical wannabes at Baldwin-Wallace. Both are attempting to lead their disciples out of the wilderness of amateur theatricals to the hoped-for milk and honey of professional theater.

To demonstrate Mauldin's vision, we look to the well-rounded esoterica that comprise his first two seasons. Last year, he paired Austin Pendleton's flawed chronicle of the acting Booth family with the folk fantasy The Robber Bridegroom. This summer he's programmed the similar, but much more rarely done Dark of the Moon, an eerie tale of Appalachian lore, based on the traditional folk song "Barbara Allen." On the other side of the universe, we have Rough Crossing, Tom Stoppard's adaptation and resetting of Ferenc Molnar's beloved sophisticated comedy The Play's the Thing. And for sheer commercial viability, there's also Galt MacDermont's "groovy" '70s version of one of Shakespeare's most forgettable comedies, Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Be warned, you won't be deceived into thinking you've miraculously crossed the border into Niagara-on-the-Lake. These shows are not comparable to the effortless souffles that annually delight the palate of John Simon and battalions of pilgrim English schoolteachers. Their most prevalent quality is a rough-hewn vitality and an eager-to-please ramshackle charm. But this often goes with some strange, though never dull, bizarre stylistic cross-pollination.

A prime example is director Plate's production of the Molnar remaking. Stoppard's 1985 nautical resetting slightly broadens the word play and comedy of the original. To visualize this almost extinct form of theater, you have to picture impossibly beautiful, temperamental demi-gods and goddesses, plumed like peacocks, dropping periodic bon mots. They interact with arched-eyebrow wry companions and sublimely silly servants, and perpetually find themselves caught up in madcap schemes. From Molnar, via Stoppard and PG Wodehouse (the play's first English translator), we have two egotistical playwrights and a neurotic genius of a composer. They've embarked on an ocean crossing and are about to surprise the composer's betrothed prima donna. Their surprise is even greater when they accidentally overhear that lady in the next compartment in a far too realistic love scene with her impossible ham of a leading man. In one of the great twists of theatrical history, it becomes the playwrights' friendly task to hurriedly write a scene incorporating verbatim the overheard dialogue in order to convince the composer that his intended was merely rehearsing a play.

To get some idea of how this sort of platinum machinery functions, one couldn't do better than to study the stylish innuendoes and impeccable timing of its greatest cinematic exponent, Ernst Lubitsch. Unfortunately, someone must have given Plate the wrong DVD, for he instills his production with the raucous abandon of a bottom-of-the-bill B movie. His ocean liner is five-and-dime, his heroine a gum-chewing chorine, his composer has the tics of a small-time hood, and there is added a comic servant purloined from Loony Tunes. Only Mauldin's playwright has a grasp on the required style. Just as Chaplin drew an entire existence from a derby, Mauldin derives exactly the right character from pince-nez glasses. Nonetheless, the voyage manages to remain enjoyable if strictly steerage class.

With its moody yearning and Appalachian ambiance, Dark of the Moon is one of those plays that cries out for musicalization by a Virgil Thompson or a Harold Arlen. Fortunately, director Everett Quinton, with a keen eye for casting and tone, brings out the inherent music in the script. This is another in an endless line of stories in which a supernatural being longs to be human to consummate an amorous itch. Lew Wallace, with his translucent, startling blondeness, makes the perfect embodiment of a live-by-night witch boy cut off from human relationships. His sincerity is echoed by the entire company in this heart-on-its-sleeve drama that can switch from Li'l Abner to Macbeth in a twinkle. Among the evening's more agreeable felicities is Margaret Ford-Taylor's Eartha Kitt-ish smoky Conjur Woman.

If you are among those who swear by Hair, you're likely to experience a similar spacey karma from the musicalized Two Gentlemen. It shares the same composer and italicizes Elizabethan bawdry with the same joyful abandon that Hair did for '60s love-ins. It's a natural selection for this young company, and it's absolutely stolen by Stephanie Nicole Wilbert as a subsidiary milkmaid with an eat-'em-up smile that threatens to devour the entire audience.

With the price of gasoline making a journey to our northern neighbors prohibitive, the cineplexes overstocked with overachieving superheroes and Progressive Field populated by discouragingly underachieving Indians, it's nice to have the reasonable option of civilized entertainment available on less than a tankful.

Rough Crossing, Dark of the Moon and Two Gentlemen of Verona: In repertory through Aug. 10 CSU Summer Stages, Factory Theatre, East 24th and Chester Avenue, 216.687.2109.