There’s an origin story attached to The Merry Wives of Windsor that I quite enjoy, even though I know it’s very likely mere legend. Queen Elizabeth I, we’re told, ventured to the Globe Theatre to see Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, the play in which Sir John Falstaff is introduced, and, delighted by that character (if not by the play’s plot full of unhappy monarchs and bloody civil war), ordered Shakespeare to write a comedy in which Falstaff fell in love. Oh, and she gave him two weeks to do it.

That Queen Elizabeth had the instincts of a dramaturg, or maybe a theatrical impresario, is one lovely feature of this fantasy. But even more interesting is how she intuited that an artist could boldly extract an element from a drama and plop it surprisingly into the very different context of a comedy. “Write me a play about Falstaff in love” isn’t too far off from “Film me a movie about Oskar Schindler joining the circus.” It’s off-center, provocative, and pretty much bonkers. But Shakespeare being Shakespeare, he made this farfetched notion work.

The play does two really wonderful things. First, it spins Shakespeare’s most farcical tale. The Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew incorporate elements of farce, but in neither is the form as sustained as it is here. A range of farcical tropes rolls out: hare-brained schemes, “hair-breadth ’scapes,” crazy disguises, sudden reversals, happy endings, and a liberal dose of slapstick. Shakespeare further fuels the engine of farce by jamming together in one elaborate plot a vast array of outsized characters. Falstaff is literally oversized, to be sure, but Dr. Caius and the other suitors for Anne Page are more metaphorically over the top. The collisions between their comic personas drive the play, and the faster Shakespeare hurls them toward each other, the brighter the comic sparks fly.

Second, the play takes on something that really resonates for us moderns: the byzantine dynamics of life in the suburbs. The play’s Windsor is a provincial town loosely tied to London, which was then, as it is now, a megalopolis. Shakespeare’s London, population 600,000, was the largest city that had ever existed in human society, and it had only recently grown to that size. The experience of living in a place like it was new. Everyone was there: English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish. French, Italian, Spanish. Scandinavian, Russian. North African, Turkish, Arabic. Christian, Muslim, Jewish. This cosmopolitanism was dislocating for Shakespeare and his age, and as such it elicited reactions ranging all the way from bemusement to fear. But for us in 21st-century America, it’s just how we live.

That’s why director James Vásquez’s idea for tonight’s production is so clever. He takes the combination of the play’s farcical nature and its diverse and familiar-to-us milieu, and heightens it by bringing it to our very own Southern California—or, even more inventively, to a very specific Southern California that we know from TV. James perceptively spies the spirit of “I Love Lucy” in Merry Wives. Lucy and Ethel plotting to pull one over on Ricky and Fred, only for them to seek comic vengeance with wild schemes of their own: this is a pretty close parallel to the hilarious anarchy that roils the marriages of the Pages and Fords. There’ve been 1950s Merry Wives before, but none that I know of have channeled the expansive energy of our very special Golden State at what was in many ways its golden age, and achieved the level of invention, panache, and sheer silliness that James and company achieve here.

We need some good laughs right now. I’m proud that the Globe and the amazing artists here can work in partnership with our good friend Shakespeare to provide more than a few.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.