CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING. If Red Card Productions' latest offering, Monkey, were to have been produced, say, by a Montessori preschool in Omaha, it would be a masterpiece. Were it to have premiered on Broadway or London's West End, the cast and crew would be hunted like dogs and the very fabric of modern theater rent asunder. OK, I'm exaggerating. But Monkey, as it is, plays to a fairly undemanding audience at the moderately respectable Richard Hugo House, and therefore functions no more or less than an inoffensive evening of totally unmemorable theater.

A concept that should have been incarnated as a 15-minute stand-up routine has been stretched to two hours of predictable anthropoid humor (i.e. "monkey jokes") on an intellectual par with Dan Quayle jokes and that "pull my finger" gag. The performance begins when alpha male wannabe A1 (Joel Isaksen) and his buddy George (JoLayne Berg) find themselves under observation in a local zoo with the eccentric KoBo (the consistently strong and watchable Robert Gifford), a simian super-genius who devotes his time to algorithms and interspecies communication. From this point, well... sit down and ask yourself, "Gee, if I were to write a play about three chimps in a zoo, how would it go?" The first scenario that pops into your head? That's Monkey. The story is spiced up a bit by tossing in a few more wacky primates when required (Gabe Denning as "monkey-nut" and Jonni Swensen as "monkey-slut") and a fistful of truly inspired one-liners, but it really never gets much deeper than that.

Fitfully punchy, sporadically clever, and with absolutely no meat whatsoever, Monkey is "theater for the fun of it!" -- a dubious genre that can never withstand cold, critical scrutiny. More than anything, Monkey resembles the first episode of a sitcom doomed to rapid cancellation, so remain at home and indulge yourself in anything on the WB -- for free.