Things ain't what they used to be for Intiman Theater. The building that used to bear its name is now the Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center, and the once august, Tony-laureate institution has downsized to a four-play summer festival, a seasonal tenant in its former home. The atmosphere at last weekend's opening-night performance of We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!—the first play of this year's festival—felt different as well, more like the giddy excitement of a summer-camp talent show.

Last year's festival also had a summer-camp air, but Jen Zeyl, production manager and designer for the festival, says it was "like the Krusty the Clown summer camp on The Simpsons. Everything was a little broken, and everyone was crying a little—but there was a lot of love for the clown." Mistakes were made, lessons were learned, and this year feels more sure-footed. And meanwhile, Zeyl adds, "We're still paying down an epic debt."

Intiman's leaders, including artistic director Andrew Russell and board president Cynthia Huffman—who were profiled in the most recent Sunday New York Times—must be thoroughly sick of the comparison between "old Intiman" and "new Intiman." But after the theater collapsed in 2011, laid off its staff, and announced it was making a comeback, it raised questions about what, exactly, the new Intiman would look like. Would it still rate among Seattle's other regional theaters, ACT and the Seattle Rep? Or would it be a new fringe company with the borrowed glory of an old name?

We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay!, Dario Fo's 1974 farce about police invading a neighborhood after Italian housewives loot a grocery store, seemed suspended between the two. This anarchic production of Fo's anarchic play was inconsistent and lurching: At times, one could feel the energy evaporating from the room. At others, it roared back to high-octane comedy, largely depending on who was onstage. This could be a symptom of uneven direction from Jane Nichols, who recently directed the gallows comedy Tall Skinny Cruel Cruel Boys—about a self-destructive birthday clown—at Washington Ensemble Theater with more success.

We Won't Pay! largely takes place in the pink apartment of Giovanni (a bumbling factory worker with an enormous belly, played by Burton Curtis) and his scheming wife, Antonia (Tracy Michelle Hughes). Antonia, one of the grocery-store looters, ropes her friend Margherita (Kylee Rousellot) into hiding the goods from their husbands and the police, who are conducting house-to-house searches. The resulting comedy is both kinds of Marxist—part Karl, part Groucho. As Antonia purrs, sighing with pleasure: "You have no idea how good it feels to shop without spending money."

The best moments of We Won't Pay! come courtesy of actor Adam Standley, also a member of the Satori Group, who plays multiple police officers and an undertaker, all with delightfully precise and minute tics. In one scene, he's a lisping state trooper (he pronounces it "e-sthate e-throoper") with a long, curly mustache, a ridiculously tiny hat, a black bow tie, and a uniform shirt that looks like it was swiped from the Seattle Police Department. At one point, when Antonia refuses a suggestion of his, Standley's face races through approximately 15 different shades of incredulity in five seconds. Acting with one's eyebrows is generally discouraged, but in this case it's masterful.

In another scene, Standley plays an aggressive SWAT officer, rolling dramatically around the apartment, barking through his bullhorn, and fighting off invisible enemies while opening up his secretly revolutionary heart: "You might not believe me, but sometimes it disgusts me to be a policeman... to have to rob people of their dignity. And for who... for the politicians and slumlords who steal them blind and leave them homeless and hungry... Those bastards are the real thieves."

Curtis plays Giovanni as a kind of Italian Fred Flintstone—an honest, go-along/get-along dope—but his friend Luigi, given a big, good-natured swagger by G. Valmont Thomas, is another revolutionary in the making. With echoes of the recent riots in Brazil, Luigi announces he's walked off the job to protest a transit fare increase. "Are you out of your mind?" Giovanni says. "We shouldn't pay anything?" "The company should pay for our commute," Luigi declares. "And they should pay us for the time we're on the train." Everyone in Fo's universe is a fool of one kind or another, but his most withering caricatures are of the buffoons who think the status quo is inevitable and unchangeable.

There were a surprising number of empty seats last weekend (15 percent of them, according to a spokesperson), but Intiman has three more opening nights to prove itself this summer: Trouble in Mind, directed by Valerie Curtis-Newton; Lysistrata, directed by Sheila Daniels; and the world-premiere musical Stu for Silverton, directed by Russell. The 2012 festival was an experiment—2013 will give us a more definitive picture of what the new Intiman means to Seattle.

Whether We Won't Pay! turns out to be one of the stronger or weaker shows of the festival will tell us a lot about where Intiman is headed. recommended