Amid the fast-paced hilarity of "A Marriage Minuet," the morally shaken Douglas objects, "Everything isn't about sex," to which the happily promiscuous Rex replies, "Sure it is."

Actually, David Wiltse's wonderful comedy is less about sex than marriage, and less about that than self-delusion.

It's a light play, no doubt, but any veteran participant in marriage, or maybe just any observer, will find it richly stocked with shrewd observation, no less funny for being true.

Take Rex's assurance about sex. Funny in context, it's ordinary enough. But Wiltse is no ordinary comic playwright.

Rex supports his point by noting that women talk about sex all the time, and as the two men are rejoined by their wives, he waves his hand to mark every double-entendre.

Funny this is, because it's true, if not the whole truth. And thereafter, because Wiltse knows how to keep a good idea in play, hands occasionally wave in derisive commentary. He does this again with a knowing little speech about the language of touching, such that subsequent touches get funnier and funnier.

Wiltse's most brilliant idea marries expression to self-conscious commentary. Call it Triple Comic Speak.

Characters talk to each other with more or less knowing humor. But they also slip into wry summary, as if I were to commiserate with your tale of woe by looking deep into your eyes and saying, "affectations of deep sympathy, protestations of meaningless concern," and you responded, "spurious expression of gratitude, denial of irritation." (I don't do this as well as Wiltse: his are funny.)

For the third level, they talk freely to the audience, making us confidants in their narcissism.

Call these three text, supra-text and counter-text -- Wilse dexterously shifts from one mode to another so quickly you race along beside him, savoring those moments when straight and wry talk overlap, tickling your mind.

There's also a fourth dimension in witty chapter titles projected above the stage, and some actual dancing, echoing the formal seduction games of earlier dramatic styles. Rex has a speech that could have come from a Restoration comedy and Douglas has Nabokovian irony.

The two men are writers, but while womanizing Rex is wildly successful and superficial, dour Douglas' books sell barely in the dozens, so he also lectures with sneering authority to resistant undergraduates.

Rex's Violet is a teacher and a mother (Rex hardly seems a father), and about Douglas' Lily, I don't recall.

Mainly, they're wives, one long-suffering, the other complacent if a touch bored. Of course they're a lot smarter than the men, whom they generally see right through, while the men can't see deeper than their attractions.

This superiority of women's insight I'd rather regard as a fantasy of the male author.

But no, face it, in real life if not always in theater, women are generally smarter. Mostly, anyway. Sometimes, at least -- which is why they let us run so many things, out of pity.

The story is that each of the four gets interested in the other's spouse, and Rex also has a series of encounters with young women, all played with zesty variety by Tami Dixon.

Douglas Rees is right at home as the painfully moral but intrigued Douglas; I especially like his lectures to his challenging students, a comic parallel commentary. Ross Bickell is like a shiny-faced, aging puppy as Rex (note the name), who manages to find substance even in superficiality.

Helena Ruoti is Douglas' wryly supportive Violet and Deirdre Madigan is Rex's repressed and rebellious Lily (note the flower names for both).

It is a rare male playwright who can write women who are so smart and engaging and make them likable, too. Side note: I, too, would be in danger of falling for a woman who actually used the word "lambent."

I don't see how the actors or director Brigden could wring any more laughter out of the play.

The former ride their laughs like pros, and the latter has set them up for success.

Yes, it's a farce, sort of, but it invites thought. Even set designer Jeff Cowie has his say with an ornate proscenium arch, a second, Mondrian-like frame and within that, richly draped crimson curtains.

Triply framing Wiltse's triple speak, this insists there's more there than immediately apparent.

Or as Alexander Pope might have said, "what deep-browed insights rise from trivial things."