"Managing fellows from the audience is like managing toddlers," says Kevin Kent, the improviser and character actor who has been an on-and-off performer at Teatro ZinZanni since it began in 1998. "You guide them, keep them away from sharp edges, try not to make them cry." Among the clowns, musicians, and jugglers at the Euro-cirque dinner theater—some are great, some are merely good—Kent has one of the trickiest jobs. He plays Cookie, the mercurial chef who announces each course as it arrives. The role could be simple: A little soft shoe and "here's the dessert folks," but through the force of his personality, Kent becomes the major conduit between the audience and the show, getting people to do embarrassing things by coaxing and controlling. "I should get that tattooed on my ass," he laughs. "'Coaxing' and 'controlling.'"

The stakes for Kent—and his audience victims—get higher as the evening progresses. Cookie first appears as a Southern preacher, preceding the pasta, singling out a diner to stand and testify to the glories of the macaroni. Then, as a suave lothario, he plucks a (straight) couple from the audience and convinces them into drag, teaching her to seduce like a man and him (now dressed like a cross between La Goulue and Carmen Miranda) to play the coquette. "I pick straights because I'm more exotic to them," Kent says. "There's a little more aren't-you-naughty-woo-hoo-hoo!" For the main course, he appears in a golden corset, tall shoes, and Valkyrie horns as the Goddess of the Hunt. During the show, performers scurry among the diners, gently mocking them, and Kent stalks his final victim, someone with "that kind of face"—open, smiling, maybe a little awed—and, when he finds him (it's always a him), moves in for the seduction, touching and chatting, testing his pliability for the ordeal to come. "I go through the room at a furious pace and poke and prod quite a lot of people during the show."

There are only a couple of inconsistent notes in said show: disco-inflected numbers—including that "finally it happened to me" song by CeCe Peniston—and impressions of DeNiro and Stallone. These nods to the contemporary suck us out of ZinZanni's century-old circus tent, with its magicians, crooners, and five-course meal, and back into our more familiar, relentlessly unmagical world.

The final victim, hauled out during the Huntress's introduction of the main course, is a sacrificial male stripped to the waist, wearing antlers, told to "prance" onto the stage to be slain. Jokes are made at the rube's expense: the nervousness in his eyes, the paleness of his torso. "Behold! The White [giggle] Stag!" Kent slays him with an arrow, then revives him with a chaste kiss. The house laughs. The rube laughs. I laugh—the rube, as it happens, is me. I am led by the hand back to my table, still bare from the waist up, to eat my baked salmon with citrus sauce. Just before dessert, a waiter returns my clothes with mock gruffness: "Here. Put this on. No shirt, no shoes, no service."

brendan@thestranger.com