There are three clowns in kilts, not 500. The show contains no more than 2 percent of the dialogue from Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy. And the troupe's style of humor is more funny-gasp than funny-ha ha.

Other than that, "500 Clown Macbeth" is pretty much what you'd expect from the title.

"Our show contains little of Shakespeare's original text, but a great deal of his intention," says Adrian Danzig, the producing artistic director and one of three performers in the Chicago-based troupe.

"'Macbeth' is about ambition. It's about who has authority. In Shakespeare's time, ambition was literally a sin against God. The play addresses the way that definition has radically shifted in our culture. Today, it would be ridiculous if anyone in the audience over the age of 30 wasn't ambitious.

In the show, which runs through Sunday at the Creative Alliance, the three clowns are vying for a golden crown. Each time one performer is about to snatch the royal circlet, it retreats out of reach. The clowns engage in increasingly frantic efforts to surmount the obstacles to their success, which include exploding stage lights, set pieces that suddenly collapse, and precipitously teetering ladders. At one point, the ground literally shifts beneath the performers' feet.

This is, after all, a troupe whose motto is "Life is worth the risk."

Danzig says the performers are intentionally subverting the old theatrical bromide that audience members should be made to worry about the characters, but never about the actors portraying them.

"That rule produces an experience for the audience that is paler than we want to brew it," Danzig says. "Our intention is to bring the audience into an active role, and we do it by appearing to take extreme physical chances. We want the audience to always be asking themselves whether what just happened was supposed to happen.

"Usually, it is. But, there are times when you walk off stage thinking, 'Oh my God, I have a three-inch splinter in my hand."

Given the show's potential for unnerving the audience, and given the many on-stage murders and copious amounts of stage blood in Shakespeare's plot, Danzig says, the show may not be appropriate for young children.

Nonetheless, in the nearly 10 years the troupe has been performing "500 Clown Macbeth" there have been no broken bones or life-threatening injuries.

"The show runs between 50 and 85 minutes," Danzig says, "and before each performance, we do a 90-minute warm-up."

When "500 Clown Macbeth" was performed in Baltimore in 2002, Creative Alliance sold out the former auto parts warehouse in which they were located at the time.

"The theater was totally packed," the Alliance's program director, Megan Hamilton, says.

"The audience was blown away by what they saw. We don't present out-of-town companies very often. But for the past eight years, random people that I'd meet while, for instance, grocery shopping at Whole Foods, have been asking me to bring the Clowns back."

The shows are part of this year's QuestFest celebration of visual theater.

"What's great about the Clowns is that they take physical comedy and trick sets and bump them up a notch," Hamilton says. "What they're doing on stage is so charismatic and compelling and irresistible that you gradually get sucked in to thinking about all these really profound and dark questions that are being raised about power and greed."

Though "500 Clown Macbeth" is the troupe's longest-touring show, their "500 Clown Frankenstein" also has received plaudits. And, they're currently working on developing their first family show, to be titled, "500 Clown Nose."

"To be a clown is more of an action than a noun," Danzig says. "It's a way of being, of relating to each other and the audience. The rest of the culture attempts to be so cool and unaffected, but clowns react to everything, down to the dust on a shelf. For a clown, anything can be a subject of inquiry and poetry."

OK, but what about the clearly spurious claim that the show is being put on by 500 performers in red rubber noses and silly shoes?

"There might be three clowns on stage," Danzig says, "but there are 497 clowns in the audience."