That's because cheers! is what we offer to the splendid cast of the Resident Ensemble Players, the professional theater run by the University of Delaware in Newark. It's not that they've revived Goldsmith's play, one of the few from the 18th-century British stage to continue being performed today. It's never been dead.

But it takes a kooky sensibility, plus meticulous timing, to give the play its due. You'll find all of this on the university's stage, where Sanford Robbins, head of Resident Ensemble Players, and Stephen J. Pelinski have codirected the free-for-all. (Another professional university theater, McCarter at Princeton, played the comedy to raves earlier this season.)

The play's full name is She Stoops to Conquer, or The Mistakes of a Night, and the second title says it all. It centers on a young man named Marlow (Michael Gotch) who, with his friend George (Mic Matarrese), comes to the Hardcastle estate to woo, respectively, Hardcastle's daughter (Elizabeth Heflin) and young ward (Carine Montbertrand). But the two confused men mistake the place for an inn, and treat Hardcastle himself (Mark Corkins) like a servile innkeeper.

In addition, poor Marlow has this hang-up: Women of his own class intimidate him no end, but common women (hey, this is 1773) turn him into a hotshot. So Kate Hardcastle, the woman he's come to court, poses as a barmaid - she stoops in order to conquer him.

Throw in a devilish Hardcastle son (Cameron Knight), an over-the-top Mrs. Hardcastle (Kathleen Pirkl Tague) and some wonderfully done business, complete with stagey asides, and it's easy to see why the play has lasted from a time when we were still colonies. It's a wacky love story.

Mathew LeFebvre's costumes are part of the entertainment, particularly the getups he designed for the insufferable Mrs. Hardcastle, and Takeshi Kata's period drawing room is perfect.

Several scenes in She Stoops call for both precision and a clear sense of audience response (example: the hilarious scene at a well in the second half). The cast members, who've built characters we understand almost instantly, excel in these finely tuned senses - first, of the play's comic absurdity and, second, of the way the audience increasingly buys into it.

Washington Irving praised "the good feeling and good sense" apparent in Goldsmith's work. In this production of Goldsmith's surviving masterpiece, the good feeling is obvious in the script and the good sense is on the stage.

She Stoops to Conquer

Presented by the Resident Ensemble Players at the University of Delaware's Roselle Center for the Arts, Kent Way and Orchard Road, Newark, Del., through Feb. 20.

Tickets: $16-$22.

Information: 302-831-2204 or www.rep.udel.edu.