The Pioneer Theater, Avenue B’s own single-screen movie venue, continues its admirably eclectic run of weeklong bookings today with “The Changeling,” a film adaptation of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 drama.

As any school kid knows, provided that the school has a graduate theater history program, “The Changeling” tells the story of Beatrice-Johanna (Wendy Herlich), the virginal but hot-blooded daughter of an Italian nobleman named Varmandero (James Prendergast). When Beatrice-Johanna meets a free-spirited and flirtatious young man named Alsemero (Chris Brady) outside a church, it is love — or at the very least lust — at first sight. The two share such prodigious chemistry and so many Jacobean-era double entendres that Alsemero postpones his impending trip to Malta just so he can woo the young maiden and follow his, er, heart to her boudoir and the altar.

But Beatrice-Johanna conveniently fails to mention that her father has promised her to another suitor. She is already engaged to Alonzo (Craig Wichman), a man who awakens none of the ardor and incites none of the racy dialogue that she shares so easily and naturally with Alsemero. Enter De Flores (Clyde Baldo), her father’s servant. De Flores carries his own torch for Beatrice-Johanna in spite of (or perhaps because of ) her undisguised contempt for him.

Bedfellows make strange politics, and Beatrice-Johanna and De Flores form a secret and mutually advantageous alliance. De Flores has cleaned up many a mess for her father, Beatrice-Johanna reasons, so why not let him help her get a certain redundant suitor permanently out of the picture? No price is too high for the possibility of carnal and connubial bliss. But the scheming maiden isn’t fully aware of the precise nature of the compensation that her hired dagger has in mind.

“The Changeling” was adapted to its brisk 82-minute running time by Jay Stern, who also directed, edited, and co-produced the film. His cast attacks the original play’s language with gusto, if not complete success. Mr. Stern’s players are at least diligent in their elocution — no mean feat considering they’re selling slang and idioms from a popular culture nearly 400 years past its expiration date. Specific screenings of the film will be accompanied by recitations of theatrical death scenes from other vintage works. This may add a context that watching a screener doesn’t provide. But the actor’s job is to find the person beneath the page, after all, and in a few unfortunate cases, the cast of “The Changeling” remains on the outside of its characters looking in.

Mr. Stern shot “The Changeling” in six days on a budget of $25,000. By comparison, Ed Wood’s infamous benchmark for low-budget folly, “Plan 9 From Outer Space” to which “The Changeling” bears no similarity, apart from its impoverished production), cost more than twice that amount and took about the same amount of time to shoot. This is an admirable practical accomplishment and no doubt a tale in itself, one that Mr. Stern will be on hand to relate after next Thursday’s 9 p.m. screening.

The first inevitable casualty of undertaking a picture with a budget as small as this one is filmmaking that employs actual film. Unfortunately, using Mini-DV is perhaps most tragic betrayal of the story. Inexpensive digital tape formats are very unkind to actors. Rinsed of film grain and the subliminal proscenium of a depth of field that changes specifically from lens to lens on film, the DV image makes almost anything but the most natural gestures look like affectations. The marriage between dialogue that challenges even the deftest delivery and visually claustrophobic, dialogue-driven filmmaking is not a happy one. Mr. Baldo’s pulled punches in a climactic assassination scene are particularly ill-served by a reliance on close-ups and the DV camera’s unnatural clarity.

In spite of Mr. Stern and company’s considerable effort to visually reinterpret an old play in a new format, “The Changeling” works better as a peek into a group of creative individuals’ possibly auspicious futures than as a document of drama’s past.

Through May 27 (155 E. 3rd St., between avenues A and B, 212-591-0434).