The Belfast Maskers has kicked off its season with a rollicking medley of just about every play and sonnet the Bard ever put down on paper in “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).”

The histories are recounted in a Big Ten bowl game, Othello and Desdemona’s love story is told in rap and “Hamlet” is performed backwards, complete with satanic verses.

Written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield when they were college students in the early 1980s, the work condenses all of Shakespeare’s works into 97 minutes of comedy, sprinkled with a modicum of tragedy. Aynne Ames, the Maskers’ new artistic director and founder of the former Cold Comfort Theater in Castine, directs the show with just the right amount of respect and jaundice in her eyes.

Ames added two women to the cast of three male actors called for in the script. While it seems an unnecessary choice that slows down the action, especially in the frenetic final section, it is hard to image how she could have pulled off this production without the panache and verve of Kristen Burkholder.

Clearly the most talented of the five performers, Burkholder often pulls the other actors along in her energetic wake. It is her understanding of and respect for Shakespeare’s language, along with her command of physical comedy that allows her to shine so much more brightly than her colleagues.

Burkholder also interacts most naturally with the audience, and that is where some of the play’s best jokes are generated. Her Hamlet is a gawky, self-absorbed hysteric; her rhyming Othello a wiry, wannabe rapper; her Juliet a reluctant kisser.

Woodruff A. Gaul almost keeps up with Burkholder, but doesn’t quite embrace the absurdity of the production as gleefully. William Nelson, Kathleen Horan and James Clayton admirably fill out the cast, but they never come close to matching Burkholder’s performance or energy level.

All in all, the production works almost as well with a cast of five as it does with three. However, many of the broad comedic moments of the original are lost because women take on most of the female roles. Men playing women are just funnier on stage than women playing men, Burkholder’s Hamlet excepted.

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)” is the first play in a season of seven productions Ames has planned for her first season. Five of the shows – “Alice in Wonderland,” “Godspell!” “Our Town,” “A Christmas Carol” and the current production – should draw in families and young theatergoers.

The other two productions are “The Baltimore Waltz” and “The Lion in Winter.”

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)” will be performed Thursday through Sunday at the Belfast Maskers waterfront theater through March 21. For information, call 338-9668. Judy Harrison can be reached at 990-8207 or jharrison@bangordailynews.net.