‘Easy Laughter’ in an Uneasy Family

Robert Shearman’s “Easy Laughter” plunges the audience into an odd world in which a thin veneer of civility and 1950s-style familial happiness barely covers an uneasy, violent existence.

This production of Minneapolis’ Peter Peter Pumpkin Theater, at the Theatre of NOTE, has a promising beginning, with a stereotypical family unit struggling to maintain the pretense of perfection in a world in which all Jews have been killed. But Shearman’s dark comedy overreaches to include too many themes besides the evils of anti-Semitism. Neither the talented cast nor director John Ursu can overcome this.

Mother Patsy (Sarah Phemister) prepares for her husband Dennis’ (Dan Mailley) return. Vacillating between saccharine but anxious pleasantness and screeching rage at her children’s unpreparedness, Patsy is “worried, but not frantic.” Daughter Judy (Beth Kracklauer) is puzzled and complacent, while her older brother Toby (Kyle Christopherson) is a controlling menace, keenly aware of the future and his intellectual advantages. This particular Christmastide, the family welcomes Dennis’ father, Ralph (Isaac Allan), who is passing his first holiday without his beloved, deceased wife.

Ursu directs his cast with a comic flair, making the trivial patter a funny, pathetic metaphor for the smallness of their existence. Yet the final collapse of the family structure isn’t totally convincing.

Shearman’s conceit is built on a foundation of illogic that connects the killing of all Jews with controlled population, domestic violence, child molestation and the sudden vanishing of all birth control methods.

If the one-child-per-family campaign has failed in China, it’s unlikely that restricting the exchange of bodily fluids to once a year would work in any society. That alone would cause enough revolution against the state and any prophet, no matter how much “infinite wisdom” he may possess. How Judaism ties into the negation of all these evils may take infinite wisdom to discern.

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* “Easy Laughter,” Theatre of NOTE, 1517 Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. Ends June 27. $12. (213) 856-8611. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.