By Carolyn Hayes Harmer

Throughout its history, Planet Ant Theatre has proudly straddled the improvisational comedy and scripted theater worlds, and that partnership is at peak visibility during the company’s Colony Fest/Late-Night Series crossovers. For each of the biannual Colony Fest competitions, the winning improv troupe is given its very own late-night time slot to script and star in a one-act play. The latest in this tradition is “The Birth of Chad,” written by the cast and director Michael Hovitch in a months-long process.

Collectively, these original productions share only two qualities: humor and a DIY budget. The rest varies as much as the imaginations and sensibilities of the individual directors and performers, some worshipping at the altar of sketch comedy caricature, others piling crisscross motivations and plot contrivances ever higher. This particular production’s bread and butter is the quality of its writing: This isn’t an exercise in explosive, hyperbolic humor, but rather a short, grounded story constructed and drafted with appreciable skill.

Here, Steve Oliver plays the title character, while the other three in the ensemble (Michael Babbish, Arthur Brannon III, and Aaron Mondry) inhabit the many surrounding characters in his stalled-out life. Living in his parents’ basement, without the means to push off and enter adulthood with his long-suffering girlfriend, Chad has made the investment to become a self-sufficient business owner. Specifically, he’s selling candles through a multi-level marketing company, the kind with a super empowering message about being your own boss and best self, as well as a distinctly triangle-shaped organizational flow chart (whose resemblance to a pyramid, Chad would be the first to say, is {ITAL purely coincidental}).

But although money is at the forefront of this objective (just ask the soundtrack, which includes all manner of hits about wanting it, earning it, having it, lacking it, spending it), behind it looms questions about the kind of person Chad and others want him to be. As his support system’s patience remorsefully runs out, the downtrodden Chad clings to the catch phrases and sales tactics he learns at expensive company training seminars, hoping that this hefty buy-in will improve his financial outlook and, by extension, his entire life. The depth and breadth of his belief – not only that the economic scheme will pay off, but also that some kind of better self will consequently emerge – drives believable stakes into all the show’s key relationships, and the inherent pep and mania of the downright cultish seminar scenes keep the action pulsing at a frenzied and downright desperate tone. Moreover, the kind of insider jargon that infects these schemes also turns out to be comic ground ripe for the mining; some of the script’s sharpest jokes and quips lie in pure gems of willful party-line ignorance.

In practice, however, the text isn’t being quite as well served as it might. Chief among the show’s troubles is the lack of physical surroundings: The playing space is intentionally stripped back to two chairs, a back wall, and a handful of entrance doors, relying on lighting cues and mimed object work to set the various scenes. Yet this leaves the actors floating anchorless in a large, blank void, at times uncertain of where to plant oneself or what to do once there.

Such a lack of cohesion also bleeds over into the performances themselves, which showcase individual strengths, but at different times and in drastically diverse ways. At the play’s center, Oliver is a fine Everyman of introspection, at first a generously funny and sweet sad-sack type who later evolves into a slick, obnoxious cipher. His straight-man approach is in pointed opposition to Babbish, who aspires for extra dweeb points in all his portrayals with liberally applied tics and silly affectations. And starkly different again is Mondry’s deep commitment to understatement, particularly in the pained, murmuring devotion of his shrinking-violet love interest. Meanwhile, Brannon steals scenes with mere emphatic monosyllables in small, over-the-top characters, but in the guise of a major linchpin player (that literally makes his money on his buoyant sales persona), the actor can’t muster the same confidence for a more true-to-life portrayal.

The infrastructure of “The Birth of Chad” is strong, in the form of a dually comedic and meditative script. As of opening night, all the raw materials appear in order, and the show’s potential to grow into its own hype is certainly feasible over the remainder of its three-week run. But like Chad, it’s time for these four promising comics to start buying what they’re selling.