It's the average people who are scared of Hamlet, who think of its title character as a guy who wanders around dressed in black. A guy who is depressed when he's not downright crazy and who winds up murdered like nearly everyone else in the play.   

The Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's production should dispel those fears. Jim Helsinger's marvelous Hamlet is so utterly down-to-earth, so utterly sane that he makes all the character's fateful struggles easy to understand. And Helsinger is at the heart of a lucid and often chilling production in which director Russell Treyz has made the characters of Shakespeare's tragedy live once again.

Bringing the people of Hamlet to life is no easy task. The play as written is 4 1/2 to five hours long, and it's full of speeches so well-known they often sound like cliches. Then there's the problem of Hamlet himself, the Danish prince who seems to spend the first half of the play whining and the second half killing people off.

Yet this production, which opened the Orlando festival's fifth season Friday night amid the traditional chill in the air at Lake Eola Park, somehow leaps all those familiar hurdles and gives us the play afresh. Treyz and his company have created something that many never expect to see - a Hamlet with the power to wrench.

That's not to say that this Hamlet, like nearly all the shows the festival has staged since 1989, doesn't sometimes look and sound less satisfying than something a wealthier company might produce. The fact that several of the cast members have to play two or more small roles can be confusing, especially when the king of Norway looks exactly like the head of a roving band of actors, or when a duplicitous courtier shows up at the play's climax even though you thought he was dead.

A few of the accents sound more like Katharine Hepburn than like the Americanized English most of the cast members use. And the general din around Lake Eola's Walt Disney Amphitheater - 

Ignore those distractions, though, and what you have is a Hamlet that's easy to like. Treyz, like most directors, has cut the play considerably: The scary, mood-setting ramparts scene that opens the drama is missing, but plenty is left to convey Shakespeare's intent. What crystallizes from the company's work is a play about everyday people - people who are witty or ponderous or confused, people who are ambitious or loyal or in many other ways just like us.

Take Suzanne O'Donnell's Ophelia, for example, an appealingly warm-blooded young woman who lacks any hint of the creepy ethereality that tends to dog the character. Take Paul Kiernan's indulgent Horatio, who grows more and more tortured by his friend Hamlet's actions as the story unfolds. Take Celia Howard's remarkable Gertrude, so clearly torn between the sensuality of her new marriage and the terrifying accusations presented by her son.

David McCann makes an appropriately bland and self-serving Claudius (and, in frigid white, a powerful ghost). Others among the company emphasize the abundant humor in this tragedy. Jack Judd finds the obvious foolishness in Polonius but also a touching sense of good intentions gone awry. And Paul Vogt makes the most of his role as the comical gravedigger, a role that is small but choice.

Yet what's unusual about this Hamlet is that such comedy isn't relegated to the buffoons. Hamlet has it, too, and his sense of humor makes him real. Helsinger's astonishment is comical when his character first sees the ghost; he revels in making fun of Polonius and his delight in the roving actors - a vestige of his former, untroubled life - is clear.

That humor and his intelligence make Helsinger's Hamlet unmistakably sane - and that sanity makes it all the more horrifying when his demons bring him down. It's a lovely performance, and one that does the festival proud. If tragedy can strike so likable a man, this Hamlet seems to say, it can strike at the hearts of us all.