These days, one tends to approach a production of a Shakespeare play expecting one of two things, a straightforward period production or a reinterpretation with an extreme twist: "Romeo and Juliet" with an all-male cast, "King Lear" with a mute Cordelia, "The Taming of the Shrew" with Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles. That's one of the reasons that "Shakespeare: A Festival," a Hampshire College Theatre student production that incorporates passages from 11 different plays, was like a rejuvenating tonic, using beloved timeworn phrases to enchanting effect.

The sometimes touching, sometimes side-splitting show ran just one hour and mixed and matched scenes and monologues from plays of various rungs of eclat, from "Hamlet" and "King Lear" to "Timon of Athens" and "The Winter's Tale." Produced and directed by Leslie Strongwater and Brianna Sloane, the show starred seven women whose performances were so extraordinary that each had contrived, by the end of the hour, to establish a peronal intimacy with the audience. Each actress astutely mined her own vibe to create a characterization both personal and accessible; the performances were gripping in their balance of comfort, humor and earnestness.

I can't pretend I understand why the directors chose to stage the passages the way they did, but the selection was intriguing and varied. The show opened with the famous scene of "Hamlet," in which the Prince, planning his play-within-a-play to expose his uncle Claudius' crime, gives the troupe of players a lesson in thespian credibility. The scene was a shrewd segue into the play. The Prince, played by the gentle and absolutely arresting Clementine Thomas, alternately encouraged and mocked the nervous player until she struck the right balance of pathos and naturalism, demonstrating the note that she and her fellow actresses needed to hit for the play to follow.

Many of the scenes that followed were interplays between sets of star-crossed lovers. I hadn't consciously realized how often, and in what varying tones, Shakespeare has written about couples with one member apparently besotted and the other resolutely resistant. The first such scene, the most moving of the play, was the passage from "The Tragedy of King Richard III" in which Richard professes to love the heartbroken Lady Anne, whose husband he has just slain in order to ascend the throne. The scene itself is an electrifying and discomforting one-to watch one person persist in a convincing masquerade of dignified, loving pursuit towards a person who responds only with murderous hatred is difficult in any context. But the production went above and beyond. Strongwater, playing Lady Anne, had enough presence to make her fine-tuned portrayal of grief and confusion devastating to any audience member.

Countering this scene was another Shakespearean classic of garbled lovers, the absurd interactions of Hermia, Helena and Demetrius in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The actresses playing Hermia and Helena, one pursued by Demetrius, the other pursuing him, were clad in preposterous frills and delivered their lines with sublime slapstick bathos.

"Festival" was all the more engaging thanks to its staging: only the front half of an already tiny hall was used, so that the audience was at times a mere foot or two away from a performer. The stage was lit with admirable frugality, keeping the focus on the small epicenter of the action. These seven people, in the course of an hour, managed to make themselves and the people they played as well-known to us as if we had watched them a dozen times before.