If there’s anything more ridiculous than young people in love, it’s parents and guardians who try to interfere with them. But Richard Brinsley Sheridan does not choose sides; he makes merciless fun of them all in his play, The Rivals, now at Center Stage.

In an early scene, Lydia Languish (Zoe Winters) justifies her name by reclining languidly on a divan, her eyes glued to the latest romance novel, her puffy dress so thoroughly printed with pink flowers that she seems to have fallen into a garden. The 17-year-old girl is so addicted to romance that she has resolved to never marry a man approved by her aunt, Mrs. Malaprop (Kristine Nielsen), but to elope instead with a dashing young man without money. Her reputation in this regard is so well known that the eminently eligible Captain Jack Absolute (Manu Narayan) has chosen to disguise himself as the penniless Ensign Beverley in order to woo her.

Lydia may be foolish, but not nearly so foolish as Mrs. Malaprop, who brings in Jack’s oblivious father, Sir Anthony Absolute (David Margulies), to size up her daughter for marriage. When Lydia declares that she thought to make her own choice for a husband, Mrs. Malaprop begins to shake—her eyes rolling and the butterflies in her towering orange hairdo fluttering—and squeaks, “You thought, miss! I don’t know any business you have to think at all—thought does not become a young woman. But the point we would request of you is, that you will promise to forget this fellow—to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.”

Sheridan premiered this play in London in 1775, the same year the American Revolutionary War began, but romance-addled teenagers and domineering parents are as familiar today as they ever were. The playwright took no pains to shade his characters with nuanced realism; instead, he exaggerates at every turn. The aunt, for example, mangles not only logic but the English language as well—to the extent that her name gave birth to the word “malapropism.” Center Stage director David Schweizer doesn’t hold back either; he has encouraged his costumer David Burdick to overstate every piece of clothing and his excellent cast to amplify every gesture and peculiarity of speaking.

The result is a hilarious production of a famously funny play. It’s the first production since Irene Lewis left Center Stage as artistic director, now replaced by Kwame Kwei-Armah, and the show is refreshingly free of Lewis’ tics. There are no undergraduate intellectual conceits imposed on the material—no giant picture frames in the set design, no surrealist clowns or wandering minstrels added to the cast, no awkward shift of time and setting, no heavy-handed emphasis of underlying themes—just a straightforward engagement of the material. Even the program book has been liberated from those patronizing essays that condescend to make theater relevant to Baltimoreans; in their place are historical essays that actually contain useful information.

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