‘Illusion’ Weaves a Spell at LATC : Stage: Tony Kushner deftly adapts a youthful Corneille’s satire at L.A. Theatre Center.

What are the real powers of sorcery? To alter? To define? To transport? Tony Kushner and Pierre Corneille before him go for all three, which is only part of the magic in Kushner’s fanciful adaptation of Corneille’s “The Illusion” (“L’Illusion Comique”) that opened Saturday at the Los Angeles Theatre Center.

Freely adapted it is, in the best sense. For Corneille, whose later, loftier verse plays earned him the stodgy title of Father of French Tragedy, “The Illusion” was a mildly satirical precursor to all that--a glitch, written when he was only 29. Yet, even then, it was burdened by a ponderous 17th-Century neo-classical style that kept the word comique out of 20th-Century range. Kushner’s achievement is digging under all the circumlocution to salvage an ageless and universal idea, stripping the nugget of its ornamentation and serving it up to us lingually lucid and lean.

There is some colloquial indulgence in the rewritten language, but it’s mostly judicious. We’re in on the joke, which never goes too far. Simply put, this is the tale of a rigid father, Pridamant (Alan Mandell), who, stricken with remorse for having provoked his son to flee the family home, searches out the magician Alcandre (an androgynous Mary Woronov) in the hope that he will help him find out what happened to the wayward boy.

Alcandre does, and the ironic twist of the piece is that after several false starts, passionate re-enactments, comic delusions and confusions, the truth is revealed and Papa finds he doesn’t like it. The lighthearted ending is a cynical but honest lesson in selective affection.

All the fun, however, is in getting there. “The Illusion” takes us into territory on which theater thrives: fantasy, witchcraft, transcended place and time, aided and abetted here by David Schweizer’s astutely playful direction, Douglas D. Smith’s bewitching sets and lights (crucial to the consummation of this piece) and costumer Marianna Elliott’s whimsy.

The entire play happens in Alcandre’s cave, a forbidding place, watched over by Alcandre’s sinister amanuensis (Tom Cayler, garbed in a black outfit that seems lifted from some Gustave Dore illustration) and where Pridamant watches on the sidelines while Alcandre leads him through reconstituted events in his son’s life.

We watch the son (Jonathan Silverman) fall in love with a woman above his station (Lea Thompson), kill one dandified suitor (Mitchell Lichtenstein), fight a duel with another (the inimitable John Fleck as her ostentatious fiance), marry the girl over her father’s objections and the thwartings of her jealous maid (Karole Lynn Foreman). Truth or apparitions? We’ll let you savor the surprises of the Corneille/Kushner ending. They’re worth waiting for.

This “Illusion” is a fascinating hybrid of fantasy and humor, with the magic remembering that it has feet of clay. It’s not “The Wizard of Oz” exactly, but . . . Mandell is sheer pleasure as the befuddled father who has never tasted tears but who, after we discover that he has a heart, proves to be a man of straw after all. Woronov’s Alcandre looks like some Assyrian prince, with skullcap and gold “beard,” but this is a fundamentally benevolent wizard who just likes to keep everybody guessing.

It’s sometimes hard to believe that Silverman as the swashbuckling son isn’t playing Eugene Jerome (the role that launched him) playing Errol Flynn. But the contemporaneous feel of the production ultimately makes this nice Jewish all-American quality not only acceptable but positively endearing. Thompson is everything a spunky Juliet ought to be and Foreman everything a sassy, double-dealing and resourceful servant ought to be.

Cayler’s Igor-ish amanuensis is a scene-stealer. But he and the other scene-stealer, Fleck, can’t help it. Attention is mother’s milk to the richly gifted Fleck, a bilious cross between Miles Gloriosus and the Cowardly Lion in his golden Roman breastplate, flaming red locks and clunky golden boots.

His dazzle rivals Smith’s setting, which is dominated by an ornamental gilt frame whose ever-changing canvases (here’s to the magic of rear projection) range from dreamy classical landscapes to modern images--none more poetic or impressive than the last, which points to our quest for new worlds in space. It is an inspired signature for a wise piece of work that never forgets to play as it instructs.

At 514 S. Spring St. Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m., with matinees Saturdays and Sundays at 2, until May 27; $22-$26; (213) 627-5599.