The Crowded Kitchen Players are back in town, specifically, Allentown.

Players co-founders and producers Ara Barlieb and Pamela Wallace went way back for their latest show.

"The Brothers Tortellini: A Toga Comedy" continues weekends through Oct. 26, Zion's Reformed UCC, 620 W. Hamilton St., Allentown.

Playwright Barlieb adapted "The Brothers Tortellini" from "The Brothers Menaechmus," or "The Two Menaechmuses," by Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus (254 - 184 BC), known as Plautus.

If you don't recall your Latin theater studies courses, you may have heard of Shakespeare's "A Comedy of Errors," which is based on the Plautus play. "A Comedy Of Errors," in turn, inspired the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart-George Abbott musical, "The Boys From Syracuse."

In Barlieb's adaptation, the twin brothers are separated after a baby snatching. Thirty years pass on the island of Pasta Fagioli, and it's now circa 254 BC. A series of mistaken identities involving the now adult twins ensues, centered on the gift of a mantle (a bolt of fabric).

One of the twin Tortellinus (pronounced Tor-tell-ee-nus) is played by long-time Kitchen Player Tom Harrison.

Tortellinus' wife Frittata (Sharon Ferry) becomes visibly and understandably irritated when he's distracted by the town's celebrity concubine, Putanesca (Lauri Beth Rogers), with the assistance of Pancetta (Sarah Thomas).

The other Tortellinus (pronounced Tor-tell-eye-nus) is played by David Fox.

This Tortellinus is not married, but has a slave, Marsala (Libby Ross), just itching and scheming to be free.

In fact, it seems everyone is itching or scheming about something or another on this island.

Gelato (Todd Carpien) isn't so much interested in the shenanigans preoccupying the Tortellinus as in getting a square meal of "meat and potatoes," denied him by his wife, Insatia (Pamela Wallace).

Frittata's dad and the town's major domo is Calamari (David Oswald).

Other characters include Frutti de Mare (Michael Thew), a chef, and Osso du Buco (Carla Thew), a physician.

The play's hijinks work well amidst the vaulted grandeur of Zion's sanctuary with the dark wood of its ceiling, arched stained glass windows and columns of gold organ pipes lending a reverence to the irreverence.

The set design by Barlieb consists of three white trellis festooned with tiny Christmas lights, indicating the Roman equivalent of row homes. Instead of choir robes and choruses, we have togas and chortles.

Barlieb's comic asides include "For Olympus sake," "By Hercules" and "By the Gods of Jupiter," an exhortation to "make sure the vomitorium is presentable" and "This list is Homeric" to describe a food shopping list.

Barlieb also threads contemporary references into monologues and dialogue, socio-political observations (the rich and the poor, the powerful and the downtrodden, and parking tickets) and the de rigueur Kitchen Players' slap-shtick style of performing.

Wallace sets the stage with prologue and epilogue.

As Tortellinus No. 1, Harrison gets the garlands as the key Player in the farcical proceedings. He has a nifty knack of turning his head just so, or stopping dead in his tracks, as if to second guess his own thought process.

As the other Tortellinus, Fox brings a determined energy to the role, while giving the impression this twin is one step behind everyone else.

Carpien brings a wiry intensity to Gelato that is humorous and makes a convincing case that he hasn't really eaten in a fortnight.

For seven years, the Crowded Kitchen Players presented plays at McCoole's Arts & Events Place, adjacent to McCoole's at the Historic Red Lion Inn, Quakertown.

With the Crowded Kitchen Players' "The Brothers Tortellini: A Toga Comedy" at Zion UCC, known as "the Liberty Bell Church" where the bell was hidden in 1777, modern-day theater symbolically returns to the font from which it flowed, dating to liturgical dramas of the 9th Century AD.

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