I was going to write an erudite, scholarly review of the Ithaca Shakespeare Company’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle but a reader interrupted me.

“No, no, no; don’t do it like that,” he said as I began unwinding my post-structuralist critical theory. “What you really should do is write about the sex scenes. And the violence! But mostly, the sex.”

So I listened to him. After all, with newspaper ad revenue in an unmitigated spiral, we should just give you readers all the sex and violence you want. That is what you want, isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

If this sentiment troubles you as a reader, Francis Beaumont’s play The Knight of the Burning Pestle will make you squirm in your seat.

Restaged and revitalized right off Ithaca’s Commons last weekend and playing again from Nov. 18-21, Beaumont’s play, written around 1607, attacks his real audience repeatedly by having two fake “audience-members” — who are actually, of course, part of the play — interrupt the “real” play.

Initially seated in the audience, Citizen George and his wife Nell continually demand that the actors perform the play the way they, as supposed members of the audience, see fit. They rewrite lines, completely change the players’ initial plot and insert their own servant, Rafe, as the star of the production. Mid-show, they even directly hand money to the actors to change the play’s course of events.

The lead “actor” tries to argue with George. “Sir, you must pardon us. The plot of our play lies contrary [to George’s proposed action], and twill hazard the spoiling of our play,” he pleads. In a crystallizing moment, the play’s “audience” comes to direct loggerheads with the players’, or playwright’s, intended course.

 Yet George, the audience, prevails. The effect is that it is not just these two raving lunatics, George and Nell, who are forcing their insane demands on the play and dumbing it down. In The Knight of the Burning Pestle, George and Nell’s intrusions mirror our own; we, too, force the play to meet our base demands, even if not as explicitly as George and Nell.

I can only imagine how effective this conceit could have been during Beaumont’s time; yet, through no fault of the company’s, the difference between Beaumont’s language and our own immediately betrays Citizen and Nell as part of the show, dampening the effect of their intrusion. Dressing them up in distinctly 21st Century garb is a nice attempt, but it is ultimately impossible to mistake Beaumont’s language for our own, and thus it is harder to understand that George and Nell’s interference is emblematic of our own.

Although no fault of the actors, the acoustics of the theater — which was really more of a room than a theater — were ill-suited to accommodate the intricate wordplay of the English Renaissance. Several of the real audience members complained to me about their inability to make out the dialogue after the show.

Still, even 400 years later, the play effectively challenges our assumptions of the audience’s influence on a show.

Pestle’s set was brilliantly designed to reflect this idea. In a dizzying design unfolding like a set of Russian Dolls, there were several levels to the stage: A black platform at the front of the room served as a seat for real audience members and the pretend audience members alike; classical white columns separated this platform from another stage, where most of the “play-within-a-play” took place; and, finally, behind this stage was a tapestry of a framed painting. 

At one point, in one of Director Stephen Ponton’s nicer additions to Beaumont, the drunken oaf named Merrythought attempts to climb into the frame of the tapestry, smacking his leg against the painting and falling down aghast. We laugh, but his confusion over where his reality begins and ends troubles our own understanding of it.

Furthering this effect, a full-length mirror stretching across the back of the theater was placed behind the audience. During the times the play takes place behind the audience, the audience watched itself watch an audience, further distorting preconceived notions of who was being watched and who was doing the watching. 

The play also delighted with a myriad of individual performances.

Playing The Prologue, the remarkably inventive Tuskegee Brown is the show’s subtle star, transforming his stock role into a nuanced character.

Michael Kushner also put the crowd in stitches in his role as George the Dwarf, capitalizing on his quick interactions with the real audience. To the amusement of my friends, at one point Kushner sniffed me and said, “You smell nice.”

“Who are these people and why are they so obnoxious?” a justifiably confused Kayla Jacobs ’13 asked in reference to George and Nell as they interrupted the “play” yet again.

In Beaumont’s view, Jacobs might as well have been asking that question about herself, or me — or for that matter, dear reader, you.

 The Ithaca Shakespeare Company will be presenting The Knight of the Burning Pestle at the Community School of Music and Arts at 7:30 p.m. from Nov. 18-21 and at 3:00 p.m. on November 21.