WATERFORD, Mich.–To say that edgy, surreal plays, especially dark comedies, are not for everyone is just a fact of life in the theater. Monster Box Theater just kicked off a run of such a play, written by underground comic illustrator-writer Larry Blamire, called Jump Camp that is one of those plays. Some people will revel in it for all its uncomfortableness, and ugly, mentally impaired characters. Others will cringe for much of the 2 hours and 45 minutes (with intermission) that it runs.

And that is where the glory is, right? Some theaters are content to put on another production of Barefoot in the Park, Chicago or Other Desert Cities. Monster Box artistic director Paul Stark, who directed Jump Camp, will give a nod to those kinds of productions (he has an upcoming production of Putnam County Spelling Bee, and he recently did Arsenic and Old Lace), but he clearly wants to push the flaps of the envelope once in a while too.

Jump Camp is about a writer and her agent searching for a missing psychiatrist in a ghost town. The idea is that this Dr. Pershing is so brilliant that they think a book by him about his methods will be an important big seller. When the writer, Lorraine Bouddreau (Tahra Gribbin) and agent Dave Toohey (Matthew Jarjosa) arrive at an abandon hotel, they are greeted and confronted by a group of what I can only describe as feral residents, and a lot of confusion and uncertainty about Dr. Pershing’s whereabouts, or existence.

The residents (inmates? patients? trolls?) include characters that only an underground comic illustrator/writer like Blamire could have conceived. Royd Vaugus, played with comic certainty by Kenneth Franzel, is the fearful and manic desk clerk. Finney Stickes, played by Stacy Grutza, is a plus-sized Mama of the brood dressed in rags and with insanely applied make-up who makes uncomfortable advances toward Tooey and is sometimes hard to understand because of the slightly Cajun accent she employs. A skittish, fly-eating Okus Specials, played by Adam Kabot, will remind many of the thoroughly crazy Renfield character from the original Dracula. Then there is Diesel Janis, played by Jim Dunsmore, also known in the play as the “Hooded Shifter,” who wears a grocery bag on his head. I can’t do much to describe this character, except to say that when he takes it off, he comes across as a guy you think might have eaten a child a t some point. The German-accented Axel Ten Eyck, who may or may not be Dr. Pershing, enters in the second act and thoroughly confused me about where and how fit in. Three more characters known as The Holding Coat, Bathsheba Mae Dorn and Pointy Pointers also grind their way through the story as well.

It’s very difficult to give real plot outline to a play like this. Blamire doesn’t concern himself a lot with plot or narrative flow; it’s the nature of the underground comic writer who is going more for dark, comic effect than plot no matter who gets left behind. I got the same feeling watching Jump Camp that I get listening to ten minutes of Howard Stern; I don’t know why anyone finds it interesting or amusing, but I understand and acknowledge that many people do.

Indeed, accessibility is the challenge here. If you know something of this genre, or Blamire’s oddball work (he directed an independent, very independent, film called The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, which spoofs 1950s B-movies, and his other credits include “Aborginal Science Fiction”), then you’ll get exactly what you are looking for–like someone who goes to an oyster bar looking for raw oysters. If you are unaware, though, it could be the theatrical equivalent of being dragged behind a pickup truck in a shopping cart and all the enjoyment that goes with that.

It should be said that the actors all do a fine job. They all have chops, and deliver on the ask made by the difficult material and their director. Some of us might ask why they didn’t abandon this weird piece during the table readings in rehearsal. But, in truth, they all appear to be having a ball, and are obviously proud of doing a play so far outside the mainstream. So, what do I know?

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