Bertolt Brecht's play about a young Chinese harlot who decides to be the best person she can possibly be - only to learn that best person is a tough phrase to qualify - has had many titles since the German master wrote it in the '40s.

His title, which refers to a mensch who lives in Szechwan province, has been translated through the years as The Good Soul of Szechwan, or "woman" or "person." So why not "puppet"?

The Good Puppet of Szechwan is getting a solid staging by B. Someday Productions at the little red-brick Walking Fish Theatre in Kensington. The intriguing adaptation by Stan Heleva, the company's producing artistic director, is faithful, asking audiences in its Brechtian way - a song at the end - to parse the play by examining their own values.

Lifesize puppets, by Zac Palladino with Leslie Rogers, are carried on stage by actors behind them, in the case of main characters. Others, including several piggish villagers who mock our heroine by exploiting her good character, are hand-held. The three gods, who set the whole thing off by looking for a single good person in what they describe as a rotten world, are adorned with fanciful masks.

The puppets built with moving mouths work best, but the acting in this version of the play is good enough to overcome those with immobile faces, which are mostly main characters. All five actors play a number of roles - a total of 31, by my count, including a mail plane - each with a new voice and a new puppet, a tribute to voice coach Steve Abrams and movement coach Morgan F.P. Andrews. (The number of roles rivals the number of seats in the theater, 39.)

The actors - the company's managing artistic director, Michelle Pauls, plus Johnny Smith, Michael Dura, Carol Raviola and Jody Gross - are accompanied on stage by Melissa Santangelo, who plays winds, accordion, percussion, harp, and other instruments, and wrote the melancholy accompanying music with Max Guerin. (If only she would play to ease some cumbersome scene changes, just a second or two too long, the show would hold together a little more handsomely.)

Heleva, in his adaptation of the morality drama, went looking for a good person or, in this case, a good puppet. Somewhere on the way, he came up with a good puppet play, a complicated undertaking for the small theater, which brings it off so well.

The Good Puppet of Szechwan

Presented by B. Someday Productions at Walking Fish Theatre, 2509 Frankford Ave., through Nov. 22. Tickets: $16. Information: 215-427-9255 or www.walkingfishtheatre.com.

Contact staff writer Howard Shapiro at 215-854-5727 or hshapiro@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/howardshapiro and hear his reviews on The Classical Network, www.wwfm.org.