Playwright: Michael Hollinger

At: Northlight Theatre at the North Shore Center For The Performing Arts, 9501 N. Skokie Blvd. in Skokie

Phone: (847 673-6300; $32-$48

Runs through: April 24

It’s 1952, see, and we’ve got three pairs of lovers: Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s daughter and a conscientious dissident physicist passing technology to the Russkies. A wharfside landlady and a Soviet spy posing as an employee of Ogilby’s Kippers (‘Put a fish in your pocket’). And two FBI agents, one of whom has a secret past. Oh, and we’ve got a corpse who will assume many identities by the time Michael Hollinger’s screwball comedy winds to its logical conclusion.

What counts when you’ve got a plot juxtaposing Communist prison camps, nuclear-bomb tests, death by anaphylactic shock, Quaker wedding customs and assaults on dress dummies in bridal salons is not coherence, nor is it continuity—a good thing, too, since Hollinger seems to make no distinction between false leads and loose ends. What counts are the unlikely situations precipitated by ersatz-film noir dialogue. If we hesitated an instant before laughing at exchanges like ‘You’re that lady cop!’/’Did the skirt tip you off?’, we would recognize a text comprised essentially of one-two punchlines strung on a framework as flimsy as a motel-room clothesline.

Under Jessica Thebus’ high-stepping direction, however, the momentum never flags. Mossy knee-slappers are lobbed out as proudly as if freshly minted (‘Do you know how to make a stiff drink?’/’Feed him salty snacks?’). The giddiness is heightened by five of the six actors playing multiple roles, but only because Linda Kimbrough, Scott Jaeck, John Lister, Lesley Bevan and Sean Cooper keep their personae both widely disparate AND immediately identifiable, while Tracy Michelle Arnold sets up straight lines with frozen-lipped aplomb (‘I need an autopsy’ she snaps, to which the Medical Examiner replies, ‘You look fine to ME.’) And if our attention still threatens to waver, there are Andre Pluess and Ben Sussman’s cinematic sound track, and Tom Burch and Jaymi Lee Smith’s neon-studded Winslow Homer billboard.

In a playbill note, Hollinger speaks of marriages contracted under duress in the cold-war years. Could our author have thought he was writing a serious play and NOT a madcap parody? Fortunately, we don’t have to care.