If you're in the mood for a tear-jerking, heartfelt theatre performance, the next three weekends at The Dairy Center for Arts may not be for you. The Dairy will host one of its first comedic performances of the year, “Wrong Turn at Lungfish,” which began Thursday night and will continue through the month, closing with a matinee show on Sunday, April 20th. The performance will run Thursday nights at 7 p.m. with Friday and Saturday night performances at 8 p.m., respectively. All Sunday shows will be at 4 p.m.

Founding member of Theatre 13 Kevin Causey and associate member Charlotte Brecht Munn will direct the final performance of the season for the company after a busy schedule dating back to October of last year.

“We wanted to find a terrific, well written, sharp, silly show for our audience,” Causey says. “We made a conscious effort to find a show that simply was just going to make people laugh and feel pretty good about the fact that they came out that night.”

And the play does just that. With a plot line that includes an embittered old college professor who has gone blind in his old age and a street-smart girl who volunteers to read to him while in the hospital, the play will leave you sore from laughter. Think Seinfeld meets “Tuesdays with Morrie.”

“It's great for people to be able to come to a live show without making them feeling like they have to learn something or feel something,” he says. “Just come and crack up for a while.”

The highlight of the show, however, is the cast that's been put together, says Causey. Steve Grad, a founding member of Theatre 13 leads followed by talented actors Jessica Johnson, Shana Cordon and Jason Curtis.

“There just simply aren't enough full members of our company to cast so we opened up auditions from around the community,” he says. “And we found three terrific actors who just fit the roles perfectly.”

And while it's the actors who brilliantly steer the direction of the play, it's the script and screenplay that really makes “Lungfish” go.

“It's beautifully written, the characters are really well drawn and I told the cast going into this, ‘There are some heart-felt moments, some tender moments, some real human moments,'” he says. “‘But if I see any of you playing those roles, I'm going to throw tomatoes at you,' because we are really working on and playing on just the comedy.”

The sentimental moments will come through the dialogue, says Causey, and the audience will be left knowing it was there without have to be told by the actors' emotions. The performance intentionally avoids playing the real and tender moments to capture the audience with laughter instead - a tactic that even “metaphysically” brings the audience closer, says the director.

“When people have been beaten down with laughter, suddenly they're open and exposed to think, ‘Hey, that was like a heart-felt moment - where did that come from,'” he says.

Causey and Brecht who are the play's primary directors, says that they believe the best dramas are comedies - allowing the audience to be sucked in with laughter and jokes when all of a sudden there's real emotion sparked among the viewers.

“You loosen up an audience, you wear them down a little bit, their stomachs start to hurt from laughing and before they even know it they're shedding a tear and they can't figure out exactly how that happened,” he says.

Tickets to the show are $15 a piece, with discounted group rates available for parties of six or more and can be purchased at the ticket office inside the Dairy Center.

“It's played in such a way that's almost formulaic,” he says. “It's fast, funny, big, loud - but really sharp.”