After you get past plot, poetry and characters, the loveliest feature about Shakespeare is: He can take it. Make “Romeo and Juliet” a 1990s gang war in Florida. Set “Hamlet” in Stalinist Russia. Twist “Macbeth” toward Washington. And Shakespeare still shines.

That’s why Bangor’s annual Maine Shakespeare Festival, which opened last week on the waterfront, is so popular and worthwhile. Shakespeare can take the combination of trained and community acting. He can take interruptions by planes and trains and boats. He can even take a drizzle of rain and the earthy aromas of an outdoor floor laden with hay.

In short, Shakespeare can take Bangor. And Bangor, in return, seems taken with Shakespeare. This is the fifth year Mark Torres, artistic director at Penobscot Theatre, has brought Shakespeare to local shores, and, it’s fair to say the Greater Bangor area experiences the festival as part of its civic identity. People who have never read Shakespeare, people who have, and people who won’t ever read him all turn out for this jolly event. This year there’s good reason to. In the most ambitious program yet, the MSF is presenting in rotating repertory through Aug. 14 “Cymbeline,” “Henry IV, Part 1” and a comic adaptation of Shakespeare’s entire oeuvre called “The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).”

That’s not to say that the plays aren’t long, tedious in places, uneven in casting and difficult to hear in moments. The best Shakespeare needs alacrity, and these productions (“Compleat” is the exception) sometimes lack it in terms of pacing and delivery. Occasionally, you might not be enjoying yourself the way you wish you could at Shakespeare.

But all of this is, more or less, overcomable and the larger point is that this is the single most astounding cultural series held in Bangor. Who would have guessed that more than 5,000 people each summer would show up in Bangor to sit under the stars and listen to some of the most dazzling poetry ever written?

The variety of plays this year is the real clincher. The festival opened with “Cymbeline,” one of Shakespeare’s seldom-performed romances. Cymbeline, the king of Britain, has married an evil second wife, and has banished his daughter Imogen’s husband, Posthumus. In Rome, Posthumus meets Iachimo, who questions Imogen’s ability to be faithful, and the two men devise a challenge regarding her corruptibility.

In the meantime, Imogen disguises herself as a boy and tries to rendezvous in Milford Haven with Posthumus, but instead meets her two supposedly dead brothers who have been raised secretly for the last 20 years by Belarius, a banished lord. She also drinks a potion that makes her appear dead, but then she comes back to life. Her idiotic stepbrother gets his head chopped off and the queen dies in a fit of despair. There’s also a battle.

For good reason, George Bernard Shaw considered the last act to be “a tedious string of unsurprising denouements sugared with insincere sentimentality.” No wonder director Kathleen Powers seems to have several plays going on at once. What’s tragic here — for instance, decapitation — is really tragic. And what’s funny — Monty Pythonesque humor — is really funny. But the scenes never really move as if they belong to the same play. “Cymbeline,” it turns out, is a joy to read. It’s SO Shakespeare. But achieving a unified vision when the form is a tragi-comic-history-romance fantasy — well, it’s tough.

Unless you’re Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield, members of San Francisco’s Reduced Shakespeare Company who wrote “The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged).” This script plays fast and loose with every element of Shakespeare, and contains all 37 plays, 154 sonnets and more than 70 characters in about two hours. Since brevity is the soul of wit, suffice it to say this show, directed expertly by Mark Torres, is a reduction of Shakespeare to a series of high jinks. And it is a hoot, especially as performed by top-notch actors Ron Adams, Mike Abernathy and Erik Gratton. These nimble performers make ballet look like hopscotch. A standing ovation goes to the behind-the-scenes work of Kate Kenney, Jess Rosenblatt and Michelle Caron. While you’re rolling with laughter in the audience, they are backstage in the midst of a props detonation.

“Henry IV, Part I,” about the rise of Prince Hal to royal duties, is a sobering departure from the wildness of the other two plays. Colleen Frashure, the director, creates a dramatic tableau about the workings of war machines — including, potentially, the relationship between a father and a son. The production would benefit from more simplicity in staging, but the principal actors — Francis John Vogt as Henry IV, Erik Gratton as Hal, Mike Abernathy as Falstaff and Andrew Lyons as Westmoreland — are excellent.

Gratton, who is a newcomer to the Bangor theater scene, has the charm and the gifts of a leading man, and (in all three plays) his performances stand out. Jeff Bass as Hotspur is unleashed in the role, and Morgan Witham, as his wife, is sweetly dynamic.

All three shows have Renaissance costuming by Ginger Phelps. There are minimal set pieces on the two-tiered Globe-like stage. Food booths this year are distinctly limited. But juggler Zachary Field gives an entertaining pre-show act. Also, in Penobscot Theatre’s 183 Main St. building, the hit show “Six Women With Brain Death, Or Expiring Minds Want to Know,” is still running.

The number of actors involved in the festival is too great to comment on individually. Some are trained, some are gifted, some have day jobs. You’ll know the difference. But go. See Shakespeare on the river. Treat yourself to one of the best uses of a Bangor summer space. If Shakespeare can take it, so can you.

For information about the Maine Shakespeare Festival, call 942-3333.