MIDDLEBURY — Last weekend, the Middlebury Community Players performed a spirited rendition of Ken Ludwig’s “Moon Over Buffalo,” the 1995 hit farce whose politics feel firmly of the era in which the story is set: midcentury USA. And yet, the play, whose original Broadway cast featured television megastar and comic whiz Carol Burnett, is not without contemporary resonances for our own screen-addled era.

Much in the spirit of British playwright Michael Frayn’s raucous play-within-a-play “Noises Off” if the main characters were spins on the two leads of Edward Albee’s notorious and anything-but-funny “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, the mile-a-minute “Moon Over Buffalo” concerns an all-in-the-family acting troupe led by two aging blowhards, George and Charlotte. The couple are respectively played at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater to great antic effect by Carl Engvall of Bristol and Suzanna Miller of North Ferrisburgh. (In a serious note, Engvall dedicated his performance in the program notes to his late brother Bert.)

MCP’s ‘Moon Over Buffalo’ on stage

“He’s a walking ham,” said Charlotte of George, and “It’s like watching Eleanor Roosevelt play Peter Pan,” said George of Charlotte. This dichotomy may be fair indication that Ludwig’s script gives most of the more biting jabs to the guys.

One exception? “You are right where you belong. In the pit,” said Bettina Matthias playing George’s old theater-hand mother, Ethel, after her son succeeds at falling off the stage.

With a pater- and materfamilias so addicted to holding the spotlight, daughter Roz, played by Olivia Olson of Hinesburg, has sought “a normal life” outside it, but is, naturally, sucked right back into the fray by the wild course of events, which includes numerous infidelities and the rumored visit of midcentury Hollywood deity Frank Capra. Like Guffman in Christopher Guest’s beloved mockumentary “Waiting for Guffman” (made the year after “Moon Over Buffalo” debuted), the fabled movie director is rumored to be coming to see the play-within-the-play.

Flung back into theatrical life, Olson-as-Roz pulled off a game rendition of Katherine Hepburn-esque patter. Vermont newcomer Lilia Cohen shone in the small, fairly thankless part of Eileen, the troupe’s junior actress whom George has impregnated through what the script characterizes as “boys-will-be-boys” faithlessness. The action subsequently reveals that George promised Eileen a leading role if she would sleep with him. Perhaps Harvey Weinstein watched this play when it debuted and laughed too.

That probably sounds like a fairly harsh judgment, and it does seem unmerited to condemn the accurate representation of a bygone era’s politics through the lens of our own (the 1950s represented during what was then Bill Clinton’s presidency). And yet that, of course, is inevitably what happens when an old play sees new light. We’ll never each of us be perfect scholars, immune to our feelings, will we?

And so it is a good thing, too, that “Moon Over Buffalo” moves fast, featuring, as does the 1982 farce “Noises Off,” what was no doubt a technically challenging sequence for the MCP players. During this passage the set’s four doors open and close for various entrances and exits in tight succession to delirious effect.

Miller, in particular, won over the audience on Saturday night, although there really is nothing negative to say about any of the performances. Everyone was well-cast and appeared to be having fun with the antics, including Raphael Desautels as Roz’s weatherman, would-be fiancé whose identity is hilariously mistaken by her wayward parents (once as Frank Capra, and once as Eileen’s rumored-to-be vengeful Marine brother). Actor Benjamin Houchen as Roz’s sensitive former boyfriend turned stage manager/circus handler was wonderful. Leigh Guptill, an MCP veteran, rounded out the cast as Charlotte’s talent agent paramour.

Much fun is had, too, at the city of Buffalo’s expense. It takes a special breed of tough to embrace such self-deprecation: “Like Scranton, but without the charm” and “If it wasn’t named for an animal it would have nothing going for it” being just two of the pointed quips in that regard which the Middlebury audience enjoyed to the tune of some keen laughter.

“I wanted to be a movie star,” said Miller’s Charlotte toward the end of the performance. “We almost made it. After all these years.”

“Perhaps we aren’t meant to be movie stars,” Engvall’s George answered. “Isn’t it nice to know our limitations?”

A beat.

“No!” shouted Charlotte.

The bravura climax of “Moon” features the comical conceit of an entire cast’s maddened efforts to get their intoxicated star ready to step out on stage with the bigwig kingmaker said to be coming to the show. Theatergoers with Apple TV subscriptions may have recognized that same conceit from the finale episodes of Seth Rogan’s intermittently funny, uber-contemporary Hollywood farce “The Studio.” What’s old is new, what’s new is old, when it comes to theatrical appetites.

“Television is killing us!” waxed George during one of his characteristically self-important monologues. Replace “television” with “handheld screens” or “social media,” and “us” with original mid-budget Hollywood films or late-night comedy, or… well, you name it, and there, you’ll see the relation.

MCP’s ‘Moon Over Buffalo’ cast

The pathos of “Moon Over Buffalo,” which as a farce the play naturally doesn’t have much time for, is in the tatters of the players’ personal lives as they opt to give all of themselves to their calling. There’s something almost prescient about the script with respect to reality television, which was itself a nascent medium in the mid-’90s, whereby the real drama is (supposedly, even if reality TV, too, has scripts) not in what is written down but what goes on in the hearts of those who strive to dominate a camera eye, by hook or by crook.

Fortunately, reality TV did not prove a Pandora’s Box for America, and the comedy of it all has remained right inside the television — or else, the screenwriters in the sky for the 2016-era onward must be scripting our national life with a really vicious sense of irony?

At the height of “Moon Over Buffalo’s” farce, Charlotte calls out from center-stage, “They think we’re all insane up here.”

Then adds a moment later, “Everybody knows!”