By Aaron Bushkowsky. Directed by Rachel Peake. A Solo Collective production. At Performance Works on Friday, December 2. Continues until December 11

Do you want to see some artists having a really good time? After Jerusalem is a banquet of pleasure. Playwright Aaron Bushkowsky and actors Deborah Williams and Andrew McNee don’t just chow down on the material, they roll around in it.

Williams plays Carol, a high-school guidance counsellor from Regina who travels to the Holy Land for Christmas and encounters a Russian-Israeli soldier named Vladimir as she’s about to enter the Church of the Nativity. Carol is tired of her iPhone being her only travelling companion, and she’s feeling kind of old, so when Vladimir puts the Russian-Israeli moves on her, she goes for it. But she pretends to be a movie star. “Never tell the truth about holiday romances,” Carol says. “It just makes the whole thing pale.”

As written by Bushkowsky and performed by McNee, Vladimir, who is trying to get his screenplay to Ryan Reynolds through Carol, is a fantastic creation, a man of unabashed appetites, wiliness, and charm. A true Slav, he is full of melancholy, but his is an enthusiastic sadness; when Carol tells him that he reminds her of the suicidal character Konstantin in Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, he squeals with delight: “I am exposed!” He’s a narcissistic beast who makes puppy eyes, shrugs, and says, “I have a good smile, yes.” And he sees himself as a deep-thinking artist: “Let us discuss big mistakes in Chasing Amy.”

Bushkowsky’s script is teeming with cultural references, both high and low, and it’s playfully metatheatrical: the same way that characters in musicals burst into song to express their deepest feelings, Carol and Vladimir burst into enactments of everything from old Dracula movies to Casablanca.

McNee is having the time of his life as Vladimir. This actor has enough charm to supply every car salesman and real-estate agent in the Lower Mainland and have stock left over. He flirts outrageously with the audience. And he can turn on a dime, taking us down sudden dark corridors of the character’s psyche.

Williams is also excellent in the less flashy but still very funny role of Carol. Williams understands that the key to Carol’s humour is self-deprecating understatement and she turns that key successfully every time.

Besides casting the show perfectly, director Rachel Peake stages it wittily. Just wait till you see Vladimir and Carol’s tango.

Itai Erdal’s lighting is luscious and the dramatic white drapery in his set is lovely, although perhaps a bit grand for the story.

Playwright Bushkowsky makes his only mistake—but it’s a big one—in the last five minutes of the play. They shouldn’t be there. After Jerusalem is all about narratives and intimacy; it’s about the nakedness of truth and the uncertainty of where it will lead. There’s a moment that encapsulates all of that and that’s where the show should end. But Bushkowsky tacks on an irrelevant and melodramatic climax. It’s unfortunate, but there’s an easy fix: just rip those pages right off the end of the script.