It’s likely rare to see the words “comedy” and “9/11” in the same story. . Even as we round 24 years since that paradigm-pulverizing tragedy, its pall on the national psyche endures.
But such is the rub of “End Days,” playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer’s 2008 comedy that is now in its South Carolina premiere. A new production by The Village Repertory Co., directed by Keely Enright, is on stage at Threshold Repertory Theatre through Aug. 30.
This tender-hearted, off-kilter play–which brings together a born-again mother, morosely depressed father and their emo teenaged daughter with a figment of a Jesus and an Elvis impersonator–gently and eccentrically tugs at those seemingly disparate bents, which in this production sidle up to one another like the celebrated masks atop a performance hall that alternately weep and smile…