If there’s one thing I hate, it is Shakespeare in modern drag. All these presumptuous directors think they can do Shakespeare one better. So, when my wife suggested we get free tickets to the Public Theater’s “The Comedy of Errors” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, my first thought was I didn’t want to go. My second thought was that a 1930s version of twins lost and found was probably worth the ticket price: exactly nothing. At least, I thought, our chance of getting tickets was practically nil. So when my wife excitedly announced we had two tickets, I resigned myself to a night of tortured transpositions.

When we entered the theater at 8:10 pm (start time 8:30), I was thinking about why I don’t like updated Shakespeare. In this case, it’s because it’s too much of a jump from a 16th century staging, with the play taking place in Ephesus, Turkey, to a 20th century one in upstate New York, without some sort of bridge between them to help suspend disbelief. Also, when directors try to modernize a Shakespearian play, so many of them get it grievously wrong. It’s usually either clunky and/or risible. Yet here, when we sat down, rather than facing a normally empty stage, surprisingly, several actors were hanging out at a dance hall. When they started to dance, with their swing-inspired moves, I was hooked.

Between scenes, the dancers also entertained, so the energetic pace of the show never wavered, nor did the audience’s enthusiasm. In fact, the dancing was so infectious that I was able to suspend disbelief over a 400+ year jump in the date and place of the setting. Through the dancers, the bridge across time and place was easily crossed, drawing us into 1930s upstate New York, complete with a Hopperesque set, an expanded version of the Edward Hopper work “Early Sunday Morning,” painted in 1930, and now on view at the Whitney Museum. In Central Park, there’s a statue of Shakespeare done by John Quincy Adams Ward that Hopper painted. It appears that the Public Theater is returning the favor and completing the homage.

Often when a director updates a play it appears awkward, but here, as in the recent update (2011) of “The Merchant of Venice” starring F. Murray Abraham, it works because of the dynamism of the actors, the staging and the nuance and insight of the director.

I am now a convert to modern staging of the Bard. Director Daniel Sullivan has won me to the cause. Even Shakespeare would have been proud. Hamish Linklater as the Antipholus twins and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as the Dromio servant twins steal and steel the show. The noble twins are the straight men, while the servant twins are the comedians. The slapstick works and works well, with more laughs in this version of the play than in any other I’ve seen. Perhaps Shakespeare was the Mel Brooks of his time, but it took a director like Sullivan to show us this.