Commedia dell’arte, the theater genre that began in 15th-century Italy, has had a strong influence on other forms of theater through the intervening centuries. Shakespeare, Molière, Dario Fo and Marcel Marceau have all been influenced by it; here in Chicago, everyone from Del Close and Charna Halpern at iO to 500 Clown show tinges of the tradition’s physicality and improvisation.

Wootten and Record’s notion was not simply to take hints from commedia, but to create an all-new, very modern yet traditionally styled commedia dell’arte play, using the stock storylines and archetypal characters around which classic commedia was built. The group-created result, as with most ensemble-created material, is spectacularly uneven. The Light of Love centers on a quest undertaken by the servant Arlecchino to bring back the light of the gods as a gift for fellow servant Columbina, the object of Arlecchino’s unrequited affection. Columbina, meanwhile, is orchestrating a plan to unite the inamoratas Flavio and Isabella despite the objections of Isabella’s father, the bumbling intellectual Dottore.

The awkward introductory song (the ensemble is accompanied by multi-instrumentalist Dawen Wang) had us cringing behind our programs, but once the action gets underway the cast’s charms begin to outweigh its misfires. The show is contemporary but not too of-the-moment, and the ensemble displays a facility for improv. Mild shortcomings (like the dependency on sophomoric sex jokes) are more than made up for by the agile shadow puppet scenes and the side-splitting, malaprop-laden ramblings of Mark Soloff’s Dottore—we’d return just to see what he comes up with next.