e all need to believe that our lives are worth living. Romance and melodrama speak to that need and take it one step further: these genres, with their fantastic happenings, call up the extremes beneath the everyday. They help us believe that our lives make stories worth telling.

Shakespeare's "Pericles" is a series of extravagant stories with such improbably happy endings that the hero himself must cry out:

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Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O'erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness.

Improbable yes, and enchanting. People are at the mercy of nature and of one another's worst impulses. Some critics belittle the play's episodic quality, but those episodes are packed with action and feeling. The actions are extreme: murder and incest, storms and famine. So are the emotions, which run from envy and brutish lust to love and loyalty undying. The characters don't need much psychological parsing. Their motives aren't ambiguous or contradictory. This one is generous and bold; that one is calculating and weak; a third one is high-minded and outspoken.

People in the play go through trials almost beyond human endurance. And since "Pericles" is a romance, their rewards must be beyond human expectations. They long for a world of loving families and just rulers, a world in which nature is benign. But only miracles — sudden rescues, extreme coincidence, divine intervention — can achieve this.

These stories are framed by another gentler tale. Shakespeare wrote his "Pericles" around 1608 (in collaboration with George Wilkins, most scholars believe). It begins with an old man who walks onstage and tells us he is back from the dead, "to sing a song that old was sung." He is the 14th-century poet John Gower. The popular legend of Pericles dates back centuries, and Gower's version was a primary source for Shakespeare.

Old Gower is also that universal figure, the bard from an ancient world where tales were sung and spoken before they were written down. All of which is lovely to think on, but doesn't matter much if we can't feel that we enter a dream space when the play starts.

In fact we do feel this from the first moment of the Red Bull Theater's production, which is at the Culture Project in the East Village through June 26. The Culture Project has two levels, and the lower one seems a vast space with six mammoth columns, a brick ceiling and a thick gray cement floor. White pillows are scattered around the perimeter. Gower (the benevolent Raphael Nash Thompson) is all in white with graying hair and beard. Holding a big leather-bound book with gold lettering, he acknowledges us with a small smile and kneels down. Two masks and a bell — instruments of his art — lie on the cloth before him. He strikes the bell and walks to the center of the space. The tale begins.

Shakespeare takes us up and down the ancient kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. The director, Jesse Berger, has a fine, kinetic sense. These actors use their bodies confidently as they move through the space in their loose white garments. They don't go slack when they move the minimal scenery or switch (with small but meaningful costume changes) from one character to another. They stay alert. Their concentration whets ours.

Since the characters are more types than individuals, the vitality of the performers is everything. We know that Pericles, prince of Tyre, will woo and win Thaisa, princess of Pentapolis. Both are young, charming and good. The fun comes from watching how the talented Daniel Breaker and the beguiling Aysan Celik embody these virtues and experience that first-love mix of desire and idealism.

The daughter of such a pair naturally must be good, too, and and beautiful. And since, like some of Shakespeare's most appealing heroines, she grows up without her parents, she must be brave. So when Marina (Margot White) is kidnapped by pirates and thrown into a brothel, she defends herself so eloquently that every man there slinks away, either humbled or smitten. (Ms. White gets Marina's willfulness but misses her valor, which implies generosity as will as strength.)

Mr. Berger doesn't insist on the obvious links between these action-packed episodes of a 17th-century romance and those of 21st-century film and television. They are there, and he plays with them: the quick rhythms and the cuts from scene to scene and locale to locale. Much more antique (charmingly so) are the handy plot summaries that Gower provides in verse before each act. A short pantomime (or "dumbshow") follows. Three are done straightforwardly, but another speeds up like a film sequence and one is staged as a puppet play in the "Punch and Judy" style. (Just one, I'm glad to say. Puppetry is in danger of tipping past its tipping point.)

Many genres and traditions are touched on, hinted at in "Pericles." In this Red Bull production they feel inventive, not scattered or force-fed hip. And as a form of magic meant to woo and charm us, they work.

PERICLES

By William Shakespeare; adaptation and direction by Jesse Berger; sets by Kip Marsh; costumes by Lora LaVon and Julia White; lighting by Peter West; sound and music by Greg Pliska; puppets and masks by Emily deCola; choreography by Tracy Bersley; fight direction by David deBesse; production manager, Allison Deutsch; production stage manager, Jason Sutton; stage manager, Emma Wolf-Saxon; associate director, Ms. Bersley. Presented by Red Bull Theater, Mr. Berger, artistic director. At 45 Below, the Culture Project, 45 Bleecker Street, East Village.

WITH: Raphael Nash Thompson, Zachary Knower, Daniel Breaker, Ashley Strand, Carol Halstead, Alvaro Mendoza, Margot White, Dale Soules, Addie Brownlee, Patrick McNulty, A-men Rasheed, Grant Goodman, Wayne Scott, Aysan Celik and Angela Ai.