The first act opened with seven audience suggestions (Harry Potter, a nautical almanac, the word 'oy,' pineapple, sheep-shearing, hot springs and Romans). Using this list as a basis, the contestants constructed a play. To make a long, really bizarre story short: spirits contact an excruciatingly awkward Yiddish boy named Harry Potter and instruct him to seek a golden pineapple. His quest begins when his parents, who have grown weary of his inability to adequately shear sheep, unload him on a Naval captain. Potter leaves with the captain for North Africa with a Jiminy Cricket-ish talking sheep creature, only to discover that the captain is (gasp) descended from Romans; recalling the famous Roman love for gilded fruit, Potter decides the captain must be after the pineapple, too, and begins to plot an escape -- but before he can do much of anything, the ship is thrown off course by a storm and blown to Atlantic City, to a casino called the Golden Pineapple. Potter realizes he has found his fortune, plays roulette, wins, meets attractive women in a hot springs and marries them. Ta-da.
The guest judge this week was Kevin Hart, an actor and director and the producer of The Drunken Bachelor Talk Show, a monthly comedy series at Lannie's Clocktower Cabaret. The second act was an imitation of Drunken Bachelor. complete with the talk show-style arrangement of chairs, the host and the liquor. The five attending contestants (Shannon Wood-Rothenburg couldn't make it) were assigned identities and appeared as interviewees.
The results were unnervingly close to reality. All the washed-up celebrity-appearance types were represented somehow: There was the recently resigned senator (a bible-toting, America-loving Republican whose career was suddenly and tragically undercut by sexual indiscretion), the strung-out performer (she chose to sing in a shed/distillery rather than a theater or a cabaret and picked up a drinking habit), the has-been actor (Biff Malibu, placenta-therapy advocate, name-dropper, over-grinner), the bubbly animal trainer (drawn to squirrels by destiny itself!), even a motivational speaker (who detailed a school of therapy called Stop Being An Idiot and suggested that the key to happiness is a firm handshake).
Because Wood-Rothenburg was not in attendance, no one was eliminated. Instead, the judges granted one contestant -- Max Schwartz -- immunity in next week's challenge.
