Firehouse Theater production of Topher Payne’s play makes all other families seem quite sane.

Topher Payne’s 2015 holiday comedy Let Nothing You Dismay — now up at Denver’s Firehouse Theater — gets the nod for probably the funniest thing on stage this month in Colorado. But like a Thanksgiving table you’ve spent too much time at, the visceral enjoyment can also lead to feeling overstuffed as this messy farce unfolds.

Eight actors, all playing multiple roles, careen through the wacky plot on the small stage at the John Hand Theater. They’re also navigating a very busy set depicting the waiting room at a women’s hospital as two adoptive parents, played by Johnathan Underwood and Chrys Duran, await the arrival of their child on Christmas Day.

They’re soon surprised by a raft of family members and others who want to be there for the blessed event. Payne’s script demands that once we start getting used to a character, they exit and return as someone else in the next scene. This drives much of the comedy while also challenging the actors to color in the lines of their characters in bite-sized scenes. The cast, made up of some familiar faces and some newer to the Firehouse stage, is mostly up to the task as Director Paul Jaquith traffic-cops the action for max comic effect.

At its heart, Let Nothing is a dysfunctional family story, with simmering resentments and outright ill-will existing throughout the group of batty characters. As Kevin and Allie — the “normal” couple at the center of it all — Duran and Underwood are charming and believable as nervous soon-to-be-parents. Payne gives them plenty of clever zingers as they react to the firehose of crazy coming from the rest of the cast. Before long, the quiet vigil they may have expected is a whirlwind of weirdness where characters are swilling Cape Cods from paper cups, blurting out tasteless body-parts jokes and sneaking off to storerooms for some senior sex.

You’ll be forgiven if, by the end, you can’t exactly recall who’s who and how they’re connected to Kevin and Allie. Mostly it doesn’t matter since there’s not much attempt in the script to pair the comedy with any emotional revelations. That doesn’t lessen the comedy, but it does leave some cards on the table that might’ve made this one more than the sum of its admittedly funny parts.

(From left) Mary Campbell as Noreen, Jenny Eaves as Kaitlyn and Veronica Straight-Lingo as Tawny. | Photo: Soular Radiant Photography

Who’s who

I saw this one on the Dec. 1 industry night with a full house of people ready to laugh. With comic energy levels highly charged, the cast barreled through the show with nary a line unlaughed at. Half the fun of the show is seeing how the actors realize their different characters, and in some cases swap a lesser one for another much more interesting. Ben Butler, for one, goes from Paul, a whiny husband type to a senile Mr. Yarmowich wandering around eyeing everyone’s asses while recounting bizarre anecdotes from his past. He’s also part of a gay couple along with Andrew Catterall, who also doubles as the annoying guy always on his cellphone.

Verl Hite plays several older men, successfully differentiating each of them with increasing mirth until he trots off to the aforementioned closet with Bubbie (Mary Campbell). Campbell has a field day with her other characters, including Noreen and Kevin’s emphatically eccentric hippie-dippy mother, Charlotte.

Jenny Kim Eaves starts out as the cliché younger wife to Paul (Kevin’s father) but has a lot more to chew on as the egotistical neurosurgeon sister to Allie (who, BTW, is a rocket scientist). The fact that she shows up at the hospital already in scrubs to “drop in” on a brain surgery is a hilarious payoff to Allie’s earlier setup about the sisterly rivalry.

Another audience favorite is Veronica Straight-Lingo as Allie’s mother, Tawny. The script gifts her with an unusual affliction: a frozen face resulting from using the hot tub too soon after her botox treatment (or something like that). To communicate emotion, she gestures at her face and dramatically intones things like “concern” and the like.

Johnathan Underwood and Chrys Duran as Kevin and Allie. | Photo: Soular Radiant Photography

Not too Christmas-y

Amid all the hubbub, there’s still the matter of a baby about to be born. Underwood and Duran also play the biological parents, Leonard and Lizzie, with the added wrinkle that they may be having second thoughts about giving up junior to adoption. Duran is fantastic as the blasé mother, who wanders off during labor to find a cheeseburger and sending everyone into a tizzy.

So far as the Christmas theme goes, other than the time at which the action occurs, it’s fairly minimal (if you’re wary of yet another yuletide morality story). There’s none of that here, and we also learn that most of the characters are Jewish anyway — letting the air out of another character’s efforts to put the Christmas tree in just the right place.

While there’s no arguing that this one delivers the laughs, at times Let Nothing You Dismay starts to buckle under its own weight. High-speed, quick-change comedies like this are frenetic by nature, but the sheer scale of people, props and set pieces on the tiny stage alongside a script that never comes up for air can be overwhelming. Fortunately, the game cast at Firehouse makes such quibbles academic as they joyously motor through it all to realize the comedy’s prime directive: laughs at any cost.

(From left) Ben Butler, Andrew Catterall, Veronica Straight-Lingo and Verl Hite. | Photo: Soular Radiant Photography