Entertainment

Southern-fried Gothic comedy ‘The Amoralist’ DOA

The Savannah tourist board won’t be endorsing “The Cheaters Club” anytime soon. Derek Ahonen’s supernatural dark comedy portrays Georgia’s famously haunted city as a hotbed of sin — but for all its sexual shenanigans and ghostly goings-on, it’s not much fun.

As with so many productions by the Amoralists, a company that loves to push our buttons by amping up sex and violence, this one is overstuffed — literally. Along with a cast of 26 (most of them glorified extras) are enough bizarre plot twists to fuel a dozen episodes of “Dark Shadows.”

Recounted as a ghost story told to a pair of tourists by a pompous tour guide in a top hat, the play is set in the haunted Chaney Inn, where the titular quartet have gone for a drunken, adultery-filled getaway.

Greeted by the inn’s owner, Mama Chaney — who literally screams when she sees that one of her new guests is black — they find the place filled with oddballs. These include Mama’s two creepy sons, a voodoo-spouting housekeeper and a pianist whose repertoire includes the themes from “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Halloween.”

Things soon begin to go bump in the night, with a mysterious doll — inhabited by the ghost of a murdered guest — showing up at inopportune times and Mama’s youngest son digging up his father’s grave, only to discover that the body is missing.

Veering wildly among raucous sex comedy, Gothic ghost story and heavy-handed morality tale, the overlong play features broad overacting and cheap gags that wouldn’t pass muster in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

“I don’t need to keep repeating myself like a Charlie Daniels song at a honky-tonk bar,” says Mama to some inquiring reporters. And the tour guide, a former actor, likes to boast about his triumphant “one-man kabuki production of ‘Uncle Vanya.’ ”

Ahonen (“The Bad and the Better,” “The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side”), one of the troupe’s founders, not only wrote the play but directs it in a way best described as ambitious. It’s performed on an elaborate multilevel set whose furniture rattles and lights flash when the inn becomes possessed. Any unused seats in the theater are covered in cobwebs.

But for all its “Haunted Mansion”-style special effects, “The Cheaters Club” is really just an incoherent hodgepodge of stylistic effects. You won’t be titillated, you won’t be scared. You’ll just be bored.