Over-the-top satire makes this 'After School' special

Rick Park (left) and John Kuntz play a variety of characters in loose-fitting wigs. (Company One)

Among the few black-and-white truths in a world full of shades of gray is this: It's funny when a grown man wears a glittering purple muumuu and a red mess of a wig. And it's not quite possible to refrain from giggling at a glamour girl gone wrong with bad makeup, a five o'clock shadow, and hairy decolletage.

John Kuntz's energetic "After School Special" starts there and keeps going, offering a delicious late-night treat that is as irreverent and ridiculous as ABC's original "After School Specials" were earnest.

Taking the Boston Center for the Arts' Plaza Theatre stage at 10:30 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, and next Thursday, through Aug. 8, Kuntz plays Janet, a pigtailed innocent forced by her drill-sergeant mother to navigate the minefield of high school popularity and win friends. Longtime acting partner and friend Rick Park plays Teddy, a bookworm with thick glasses and a reputation for inconsistent bladder control. Their meeting in a public "libary" launches a journey of self-discovery that ends, after a few lessons in morality, in a life-or-death beauty pageant and the self-destruction of a runaway robot.

While Kuntz's script is full of engaging absurdities and winking exaggerations of theatrical devices, the real fun is wondering, when either Janet or Teddy leaves the stage, who will return. With frequent costume changes, Park becomes Janet's mother, who insults her daughter and threatens to kill her dog, and morphs into brash Marie, the last popular girl left standing after a series of unsolved murders. Kuntz ditches Janet's wide-eyed, blinking goodness to don the dazed nature and pink hair of a dropout musician who thinks about boys when he's bedding girls.

High school dramas - the ones we experienced in real life, and the ones we watch on television - offer plenty of material for satirists, and as the plot devolves into a series of bizarre revelations, Park and Kuntz propel themselves along with contagious glee. Their wigs become increasingly disheveled, and the beads of sweat on their foreheads ever more apparent; they are having a good time, and they invite the audience to join in, alternately making fun of those sitting in the front row and asking them for advice.

The result is an intimate performance, as if those watching the show are friends at a barbecue who've been promised an hour of backyard entertainment by two men with a penchant for pithy silliness. By the time Kuntz and Park reach the climactic beauty pageant, the story's become nearly nonsensical, and they've thrown in a lobster hat and an inflatable guitar, plus two pairs of leopard-print pants and a gold bandeau. Don't think too hard, they seem to be saying: Just watch this madness, and laugh.

Emma Brown can be reached at ebrown@globe.com.