By Leonard Jacobs

The jubilee in Rome is a million miles from the real action in The Constant Couple, the Pearl Theatre Company’s fine revival of George Farquhar’s 1699 Restoration comedy. Yet it pops up constantly as the play’s reliable punch-line, especially as it’s the intended destination of Clincher (Eduardo Placer), a flamboyant youth luxuriating in his inheritance.

Clincher is also one of the few men in The Constant Couple not obsessed with alluring Lady Lurewell (Rachel Botchan). For her, a likelier romantic possibility might be suave, upstanding Colonel Standard (John Pasha) or handsome, debonair Sir Harry Wildair (Bradford Cover). Or callow, devious Vizard (David L. Townsend), who is the nephew of yet one more suitor—aging, lecherous Alderman Smuggler (Dominic Cuskern), who is so smitten with the lady he’ll even cross-dress to impress.

Or maybe—as Lady Lurewell admits to her maid, Parly (Robin Leslie Brown)—she simply likes tying men up in libidinous knots. A man whom she truly loved jilted her years ago, you see, so all men must pay.

In the Pearl’s production notes, artistic director Shepard Sobel speculates that this may be the first professional production of The Constant Couple in New York City. I poked around and think I may have found one in 1768, but the play is still a find. And despite an occasional bout of uneven acting and a proto-Shakespearean set (by Harry Feiner) that needs some shoring up, Jean Randich’s production is rich and rollicking. Sometimes Randich’s adventures in anachronism are strange—such as when a lowly porter, Tom Errand (Orville Mendoza), cruises about on roller shoes—but she’s clearly dug her hands in very deeply and unearthed a long list of reasons why other companies should add this play to the usual classical repertory. With its feast of bon mots (“nothing suits vice like want of sense”), The Constant Couple is high style.

Placer understands the style implicitly. His Clincher, prancing and preening across the Pearl’s wide, shallow stage, is a stellar comic indulgence; there is an immediate surge of energy whenever he appears. The play itself teems with fops, flops, roués and at least one genuine innocent—Clincher’s younger brother, Clincher Jr. (Sean McNall), as earnest a country bumpkin as his elder brother is fey and dissolute. Their subplot finds Clincher Sr. exchanging clothing with Tom Errand, to disastrous results. Nearly as dreadful as what happens when Smuggler, donning drag at the request of Lady Lurewell, winds up pawed and ravaged by the blindfolded Vizard, his own flesh and blood.

Farquhar, all of 22 when he wrote the play (and before The Beaux Strategem, his best known work), lavishes improbabilities onto his louche characters before inserting them into his latticework of storylines. For example, there’s Vizard’s honorable cousin Angelica (Jolly Abraham),Wildair and Angelica’s mother Lady Darling (Joanne Camp), who hopes to marry them to one another. Except that Vizard has played a dirty trick, letting Wildair believe that Angelica is a whore, something that actually fits his conscience just fine.

The play bears all the marks of a young writer eager to storm the barricades. This is why rethinking a few choices might help. Eliminate the musical interludes that needlessly put the brakes on the action, and reconsider having lights drop from the flies to be used briefly as follow-spots. Conceptually, it eluded me completely.

Through December 23. Pearl Theatre Company, 80 St. Marks Pl. (near 1st Ave.), 212-598-9802; $40-$50.