Here's a theater trivia question: What do Shakespeare, Rodgers and Hart and Stephen Sondheim all have in common?

Answer: They all borrowed a basic plot line from the Roman playwright Plautus' "Menaechmi," a comedy of mistaken identities about a separated pair of identical twins.

But you'll have to look hard to find Plautus' original roots in Tony Pisculli's staging of Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors," the third and last offering in this year's Hawaii Shakespeare Festival. Lacking zip and drive, the production also bears little family resemblance to Sondheim's "A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum" or Rodgers and Hart's "The Boys from Syracuse."

It might be that Pisculli's staging concept was simply too difficult to realize.

The play has 18 roles. Pisculli casts it with five identically dressed young women — in black, with hair pulled back, and sporting a large, red clown nose.

Since Shakespeare added a second set of identical-twin servants to serve their twin masters, the slapstick plot turns on the physical comedy resulting from mistaken identities. For this to be funny, the audience can't be more confused than the characters.

Unfortunately, that's just what happens. Aside from a rare stage prop, the cast uses only their bodies and voices to distinguish their roles. They don't succeed.

Adding to the problem, the women's voices and their sometimes rapid delivery obscure the words. Granted, wearing a tennis ball on one's nose does hamper articulation. This forces the audience into aural archaeology, sifting through sentences to pull out scraps of meaning and reassemble them into thought. Such piecing together means we're continually playing catch-up with the advancing dialogue.

Audience attention is a dangerous thing to waste.

Pisculli does come up with a couple of interesting staging bits in the first act. He slows down an otherwise throwaway monologue describing the shipwreck that separates the twins by bringing up audience volunteers to stand in for the roles. It adds clarity and some interest, but eats up too much time.

In a second set piece about a master locked out of his own house, a curtain on a stick flips back and forth as the actors scurry about, playing people on both sides of the door.

Unfortunately, these rare physical bits aren't enough to sustain the play.

So, hopelessly lost in the plot, unable to understand half of what was being said, and not having laughed once, I left at intermission. The score: Comedy: 0, Errors: Plenty.