The puns, oh god, the puns.

If you can think of a pun that involves marine life, courtroom procedure, or marine life enacting courtroom procedure, you can bet it will be found somewhere in the Bryan Willis script of The Incredible Undersea Trial of Joseph P. Lawnboy - the tale of a 20-something perennial high school student captured by pollution-stricken sea life to stand trial for his contribution to humanity's crimes against the water.

Lawnboy is a show for children, through and through. Its necessarily short running time - an hour is all any parent is likely to get out of the target audience before a potentially fatal case of the fidgets sets in - is full of bright colors, exaggerated expressions and blatant jokes.

As is made fairly clear by the synopsis, the show is also filled with messages - obvious, outright messages. Don't pollute your lawn. Don't throw oil down your storm drains. Don't waste water. Tear open your six-pack rings.

And then there's the broader social message, which Scott Campbell points out in his director's notes: "In this play, we learn that second chances do exist, and that we need to make the most of them. We learn that it's never too late to make a change for the better."

We also learn that it is perfectly acceptable to fall in love with an opera-obsessed fish.

Wait, what? Caring, lasting friendship I can certainly understand. But Lawnboy plays the ultimate relationship between Joe, the human lawn boy (played by Jerod Nace), and Greta the fish (Caresse Robertson) a little closer to romance than one might expect - or accept.

Bizarre fish-love aside, Lawnboy is as fun as it ought to be, and as silly as it ought to be. The children in the audience are encouraged to shout gibberish periodically, which it seems children are naturally inclined to do anyway. And adults are thoroughly encouraged to act like children and shout right along.

The entertainment value of the show is helped immensely by the consistent sense the cast is having as much fun as they hope the audience will. Longtime TLT mainstay Betzy Miller gets to waggle around four extra arms and sport some fairly epic sunglasses as Darlene - a mayfly larva. Caresse Robertson has the opportunity to show off her PLU-trained vocal chops, while a fellow Robertson, David, lords over the show's pun quotient as narrator and judge. And Nace gets to play a cheerful, exaggerated doofus. Unfortunately having fun doesn't help Darrel Shepherd's singing as Fred, the deep-diving loon prosecutor, but on the whole the performances are quite acceptable.

All told, Lawnboy simply isn't theater for adults. There is little subtlety to its message, and it is, at times, utterly nonsensical; but it largely achieves its goal in a too-empty niché: theater made by adults for children. Most theater you see for children are plays featuring children as cast, and while that is certainly important, equally important are shows put on by trained actors to develop young, interested theater lovers.

[Tacoma Little Theatre, The Incredible Undersea Trial of Joseph P. Lawnboy, through March 14, 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Saturday-Sunday, $15, $10 family discount when purchasing three or more tickets, 210 N. I St., Tacoma, 253.272.2281]