Something of the residual brooding college student in me was prepared to be cranky about this interview with John Michael Higgins, who will direct Intiman's upcoming P. G. Wodehouse farce The Play's the Thing. "Mere fluff," I thought, contemptuously stroking my unshorn chin. "Bourgeois, bluehair-pandering bullshit." But Higgins, a longtime stage and screen actor, probably most famous for his roles in A Mighty Wind and Best in Show, blew my pretensions away like so much Gauloise ash.

"The goal of this play is to envelop and delight," Higgins said, and proceeded to shame the snooty chip right off my shoulder. "That is very rare in our culture. We don't do that anymore because we're too scared. We think it's 'light,' that it doesn't have meaning. I think political theater is light theater, because it thinks it's engaging, but it refuses to engage the audience. Because it's polemic, it fails to ask questions. The great political theater writers like Shakespeare and Shaw--their abilities as playwrights always got the better of them as polemicists. They couldn't help but write fascinating, fully rounded, ambiguous people. They tried, but they failed. With every giant idea Shaw had on his soapbox--vegetarianism, whatever it was that day--it's not what you remember. What you remember is that man going through that problem."

Shows what I know.

The original version of The Play's the Thing was The Play at the Castle by Hungarian writer Ferenc Molnár, whose belle époque plays are enjoying a popular resurgence. A few have been adapted over the years--notably, Liliom, which became Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel, and The Play at the Castle, which Wodehouse turned into The Play's the Thing and Tom Stoppard adapted as Rough Crossing.

Wodehouse's version of the farce sets the zaniness on the Italian Riviera. Playwright Sandor Turai, his collaborator, Mansky, and their promising young composer come to an Italian castle to present their latest project to Ilona, their prima donna and the composer's fiancée. The young man is shocked to overhear his lady swapping sweet nothings with an aging lothario, who is her former lover and, even worse, an actor. The devastated composer threatens to destroy the score he dedicated to her and Turai springs into action, trying to explain away the incident as a rehearsal for a new play. To make the subterfuge stick, Turai has to write that play. Cunning plans and crazy capers follow.

"The play is a superb piece of writing," Higgins said. "It's the highest order of comedy. The startling thing about it, and I know this is what Stoppard and Wodehouse were responding to, is its farcical structure coupled with its heartbeat. It's very hard to write a farce, but it's almost impossible to write a farce about people, because the farcical form demands that people be objectified so they can be targets for the playwright, like ducks going by in a shooting gallery. Introducing ambiguity, equivocation, and questions into a farce structure is extremely difficult as a writer and Molnár could do it."

Though Higgins has a long resumé in sitcoms and movies--he was in The Man Who Wasn't There and is slated to appear alongside Wesley Snipes in the upcoming Blade 3--he's been a theater actor throughout his life and has something of an international reputation as a commedia dell'arte actor, specializing in the Harlequin character.

So, I asked, were you one of those diehard theater people who thought movies were for sellouts?

"I still think that," he said. "I don't like movies very much. They're fun to do, but they're almost unrelated to theater. One is acting and the other is just behaving. The biggest problem is that as a performer, you aren't allowed to do your own editing--you can't quite own what you do. For me, theater is a much more enlivening and human activity."

Then why isn't it more popular?

"For those reasons! And economics is a large part of it--theater is expensive to produce and its nature precludes easy reproduction for mass audiences. And that is its charm."

The Play's the Thing previews June 11-15 and opens Wed June 16 at Intiman Playhouse, 201 Mercer St, Seattle Center, 269-1900, $27-$46.