This ends now, doesn't it?
Promise us, Las Vegas Little Theatre, that after season-launching original Beau Jest and now season-ending sequel Jest a Second, there isn't a third entry in this schticky mess—no Jest Because We Felt Like It, okay?
In James Sherman's initial sitcomy salvo, Sarah, a young Jewish woman anxious to pacify her old-world parents, hires Bob, a gentile actor, to pose as her Jewish boyfriend, and oy, as your Yiddishe mama might say, you shouldn't know from such high jinks! More like below-the-lowest low jinks.
In this equally emaciated follow-up, set one year later, Sarah has married and is expecting a baby with Bob, who converted to Judaism and is now obsessively religious. But the focus shifts to Sarah's therapist brother, Joel, a supporting player in Beau, now in a dither over revealing that Randy, the girlfriend his folks expect to meet at a family dinner, is actually Randy, the boyfriend he doesn't know how to tell them about, even if he's otherwise a Jewish mother's dream—a doctor, mohel and rabbi's offspring.
And a clumsier—albeit well-intentioned—morality play about tolerance, acceptance and unconditional love you shouldn't know from either, with such noble ideals cast as comic crutches for cardboard characters. LVLT is courting its more traditional subscriber base by framing its season with twin Jests—in theory a sound strategy in a season also offering the risky Take Me Out—but conservative material need not be inferior material.
Jest a Second moves with the speed of someone trying to breaststroke through a vat of Jell-O. Sherman desperately wants to pool Jewish-tinged screwball comedy (Bob, for reasons best left unexplained, spends half the play in drag, pretending to be Randy as a woman, at one point ducking under a table to change into and out of a dress) with social commentary, an unwieldy boat to keep afloat. Both drown in an undertow of bland one-liners, such as when brother and sister gauge their relationships to Mom and Dad:
Joel: "You'll always be their princess."
Sarah: "And you'll always be their queen."
That's the height of hilarity here.
Several performances are superior to the script, with Helen Lipton and Charlie Rosenberg reprising the parents with the same cuddly haimishness (Yiddish for warm and folksy) they mined in Beau Jest. Stefanie Player, in a largely spectator role as Sarah, gets to do little but find subtle variations on the ol' roll of the eyeballs, but her down-to-earth presence is a comforting anchor, and Jerome Vital kicks in some comic charm as boyfriend Randy, especially when striking an exaggerated macho posture as the deception reaches its apex.
But a pair of critical performances short-circuit the works: Returning as emotionally torn Joel, Michael Button's delivery is dry and rote, diminishing both the character and the central conflict. And, as Bob, whose dress-up pretensions should send the farce into the stratosphere as he tries to pass for the Randy his in-laws expect, Jeremiah Allen turns believability inside out. More at ease in drag rags than dude duds, Allen negates the zany potential of screwball-comedy cross-dressing, which relies on a man seeming outrageously out of place attempting to pass for a woman. As a married couple, he and Player plunge below zero on the chemistry meter, and Allen aggravates matters in Act II by inflating Bob's fretting into bug-eyed, over-the-wall mugging.
After LVLT addressed homosexuality with more authenticity in Take Me Out, Jest a Second comes off as merely an ethnic exercise in nattering neuroses.