Sometime during the long and unforgiving winter, one of the workshop buildings at the Lakewood Theater collapsed under the weight of accumulated snow.

That's certainly one way of bringing down the house.

Another way is to open the 2008 season -- Lakewood's 108th -- with a fast-paced, genuinely funny, audience-pleasing British farce titled "Cash on Delivery."

If you attended the final show of Lakewood's 2007 season -- a fast-paced, genuinely funny, audience-pleasing British farce titled "Tom, Dick and Harry" -- "Cash" will give you an uncanny sense of dŽjˆ vu.

Both shows are set in London, written by Michael Cooney and directed by Jeffery Quinn, who is also in the cast.

Again the plot revolves around shady schemes spinning centrifugally out of control.

Stan Pinnette is once more married to Dianna Gram, from whom he attempts to hide his sketchy ploys. Mark Nadeau revisits Stan Laurel. M.J. Clifford struts as a pompous civil official. Jayson Smith does physical comedy. The sets are nearly identical. And yet again, the audience must supply London accents with its own imagination, because the actors -- with the exceptions of Juan Lavelle-Rivera, Bob Keniston and Jen Flannery -- don't seem interested in doing dialect.

One fresh addition to this production is button-cute Lakewood newcomer Nicole Beaulieu, as a well-meaning but ditzy social worker.

This version of Cooney looniness involves not only underhanded capers gone awry, but more cases of mistaken identity than you'll find Obama buttons at a gay wedding.

The problem, it seems, is that Pinnette's character (Eric Swann) is a landlord who has gotten into the habit of cashing social service checks the government keeps sending tenants who have since departed.

Swann is desperate to end the deception, but he finds that stopping the gravy train is not as easy as jumping aboard had been, for the government seems to have a new entitlement for every category one can imagine.

As Eric puts it, "I want to get out, but they keep sending me more money!"

Cooney's deftly written script constructs a web of relationships in which the characters move about as in a game of three-dimensional chess.

As the chicanery escalates, the players must take on false identities while simultaneously maintaining the real, depending on the situation, lest the whole fiction collapse like a workshop building under the weight of accumulated snow.

It can be a confusing bit of presto change-o to watch, and it must have been extremely challenging for the actors to keep track of the plot sequence, much less to hone the timing needed to pull it off successfully.

By and large, they manage to do just that. In the opening performance, some dropped lines were evident, but what do you want for the first show of the first show of a new season? The few moments of whose-line-is-it silence did not, at any rate, have an impact on the overall quality of the performance, which was laugh-out-loud hilarious.

It would be difficult to spotlight too many individual moments of outstanding comedy, for this is truly an ensemble production that depends on coordinated team play, whipping the ball around like the Celtics' backcourt. But there is an exchange between Clifford and Pinnette in the second act that will have you howling and wondering what rehearsals for this production must have been like. Some of the humor is ribald enough that you'll want to leave the kids at home. But you do want to get a sitter, bring a scorecard to keep track of the players, work on pretending to hear British accents and come prepared to enjoy some laughs served up well done.

Lakewood Theater is located on U.S. Route 201, approximately 6 miles north of Skowhegan Center. Remaining performances are 4 p.m. Sunday; 2 p.m. Wednesday; 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday. Tickets $19; $21 at door. Call 474-7176 for more information.

Ken Ganza is a teacher, actor and community theater enthusiast who lives in Waterville.