I couldn't help thinking, while watching the talented cast in Good Company's "Rough Crossing" at the 2nd Space Theatre goof it up with skill and aplomb, that this farce by Tom Stoppard was almost working despite the script. This might sound strange, but it crossed my mind that if the cast were doing the show in German, say, it'd still be about 60% as funny as it would be in English -- thanks to the cast's expert physical comedy, exaggerated vocal inflections and well-staged action. Sure, many of the pertinent plot details would be lost if it were in a different language, but most of the evening's biggest laughs at the opening-night performance -- at least from the audience's point of view -- came from straight slapstick.

The result is a show that is neither as giddy nor as high-brow hilarious as I think Stoppard intended it to be. It's as if the playwright, known for such sophisticated existential romps as "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" and densely intellectual whoppers as "Arcadia," got a little too fancy with his attempt at farce.

Set in the 1930s aboard a ship crossing the Atlantic from England to New York, "Rough Crossing," directed by Elizabeth Fiester, is another of those "show within a show" concepts so popular within the comedy genre. Playwrights Sandor Turai (Gordon Moore, one of Fresno's best comic actors) and Alex Gal (Henry Montelongo) are desperately trying to finish up a musical play in time for it to open in New York. They've brought along composer Adam Adam (a very funny Andrew Cardillo) and two of the play's leading actors: Natasha Navratilova (Amelia Ryan) and Ivor Fish (Tom Janacek) to work out the kinks in the show.

A romantic complication is required in a set-up such as this, and here it's between the young Adam and the older Natasha. The problem is that Ivor also has his eye on his leading lady, and an overheard encounter between Ivor and Natasha so devastates Adam that he doesn't want to work on the show.

All this is set against a slightly surreal backdrop as the storylines of the two plays (the actual "Rough Crossing" and the play within it) begin to overlap. For example, just after the two playwrights pooh-pooh the idea of plays that kick off with all-encompassing explanatory speeches -- they dismiss them as lazy -- the ship's steward (an amusing Jason Welles) unleashes one on the audience.

There's a natty, dignified feel to the ensuing hijinks, as if Stoppard is paying homage to Noel Coward and P.G. Wodehouse. (The ship's steward is there in the butler-type role to tidy up the plot and hurry it along.) Yet some of the writing in the play-winthin-a-play is so obtuse that the desired crispness and period-piece zing of the proceedings mush up on us. The plot -- something about a jewel thief and a cruise ship -- is so convoluted that its unleashing becomes less a comic experience and more an attempt to browbeat the audience into literary submission.

Janacek and Ryan have a sweet and silly chemistry together, and Cardillo's vocal tics are (at first) downright hysterical. (His character's temporary affliction, a sort of delayed-action stutter that results from severe emotional stress, is one of those character details that is funnier in concept than execution.) Welles gets in some good laughs as the clueless steward (he thinks the ship's stacks are called "smoke sticks"), who in a long-running gag manages to keep snaring glasses of cognac meant for the irate Sandor.

Moore -- decked out in Ginger Kay-Lewis Reed's dapper costumes -- is engagingly filled with bluster and comic bravado, but I can't help but think he's a little too manic for the role. And it seems a large flaw to me that the overheard incident that sparks so much consternation in the first act seems to take forever to be resolved in the second.

David Pierce's happy shipboard set evokes the mood and feel of the era, and Fiester uses some clever staging to suggest the tumult of a ship tossing at sea. Overall, "Rough Crossing" does have its rough spots, but it certainly doesn't sink.