The Bath Shakespeare Festival in conjunction with the Patten Free Library has kicked off its summer season with the comedy “Much Ado About Nothing.”

Last week’s premiere was well attended by all ages, even with the possibility of showers driving the performance indoors.

The plot centers around Beatrice and Benedick, two characters who eschew marriage and whose only passion appears to be their hatred of one another. Secretly, friends and family then plot to make a couple of the two.

Although maintaining the original Shakespearean language, this rendition is set around the prelude to the roaring ’20s, complete with jazz music and the Charleston.

According to Artistic Director Stephen Legawiec, this is the fifth year the group has performed in the park. “Much Ado About Nothing” was preceded by “Twelfth Night,” “As You Like It,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Comedy of Errors.”

“We like to give our audiences a comedy and ‘Much Ado’ is a terrific play,” Legawiec said. “We happen to have an amazing Beatrice and Benedick and felt the time was ripe for this show.”

The show doesn’t stop for these actors after their run in Bath. They will be packing up and taking the show to the Camden Shakespeare Festival where it will run alongside “Romeo and Juliet.”

Legawiec said they try to get Maine actors involved as much as possible with Mainers from Camden to Parsonsfield participating this season.

A look at the company biographies shows each player with a long resume of Shakespearean acting. Morgan Hooper, who plays Don Pedro, has acted in 15-20 separate Shakespeare plays, by Legawiec’s account.

“We have brought in six professional actors from around the country to fill out the cast,” Legawiec said. “These actors come from New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Chicago.”

Legawiec said many of the actors have been with the Bath festival for years. It’s that relationship that helps the company produce fresh, on point, renditions.

“We spend a lot of time trying make the text and characters clear,” Legawiec said. “We want the play to be accessible — I am not a big fan of Shakespeare in Tights.”

During the premiere, director Jeri Pitcher herself couldn’t stop laughing as the actors entered and exited from four points in the audience; often interacting with the guests themselves.

“‘Much Ado’ is a rollercoaster!” Pitcher said. “There are misunderstandings, mistakes, misinformation, and misguided actions. We go from peace to war to peace again and from love to hate and to love again, seemingly in an instant.”

Pitcher said the play uncovers our inconstant human nature.

“While we are at war, we think about love and when we are in love, we grow restless and discontent,” Pitcher said. “Whether we are in Shakespeare’s time or our own, the only constant is inconstancy.”

Jokes still fun

Directing Shakespeare for some 30 years, Pitcher said she never ceases to be amazed by the range of The Bard’s imagination. Four hundred years after their writing, Pitcher said the jokes still come across as funny, quoting the Sexton character, “Oh, that I had been writ down an ass!”

Pitcher recounted the observation of an actor last year, who remarked about the similarity current theater people still have with Shakespeare’s actors, with the same nervousness, peeking around the curtain to seek out familiar faces and the feeling of nailing a joke or an emotional moment.

“There is a great satisfaction in showing the audience that Shakespeare didn’t write about Elizabethan people, he wrote about us,” Pitcher said. “We hope to prove that again this summer.”

“MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING” runs 6 p.m. Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays until July 23. Admission is $20 for adults, $15 for students and $5 for children under 12.