Actors buzz in comedy `The Bug’

Dennis Post doesn’t want to be transferred to St. Louis. He likes his job down in assembly, putting all the fancy colored wires into place and being a regular low-level employee at Jericho Inc.

But he’s got it in his mind that he’s being sent to St. Louis, and when he ventures upstairs to wriggle with a supervisor he has never met, he inadvertently steps on a computer bug the size of Missouri — and into the Pac Man plot of Richard Strand’s chip-off-the-old-computer comedy “The Bug,” which opened last night at Penobscot Theatre.

From the second he enters the zipped-up office scene, Dennis (played limberly and loudly by Chamblee Ferguson) is like a bumblebee caught in a car with the windows up. Wearing clashing duds and spouting goof-off jokes, Dennis bumps clumsily into the decorum of the programmed personality of Linda (Kirsten Skrinde), the pill-popping calm of Kimberly (Heidi Ewart) and the two-by-four charm of Mr. Radziejeski (Max Shippee). With his whine that he can’t be sent to St. Louis, Dennis breaks them down and makes them listen to his real, live concerns.

But when they can’t find any pertinent information about his department head in the computer, the whole well-oiled machine bytes the big one. After all, in a corporation like Jericho, if you’re not in the computer, then you’re a bug — or a money-sucking mosquito. And frankly, Dennis doesn’t really care if his boss is a fraud or that he has uncovered what appears to be a well-endowed slush fund or even that there’s not a ping-pong table for the workers. He just doesn’t want to go to St. Louis.

It takes a lot of dramatic red tape to get to the final blowout, which isn’t as interesting as some of the bits in the middle, but guest director Roger DeLaurier keeps “The Bug” buzzing along at a sit-com pace. The actors work swiftly through some carefully choreographed and often funny schtick. Plus they are well-matched in skill. The combination makes for a light and entertaining end to this year’s season.

“The Bug” will be performed 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 8:30 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday through May 15 at the Penobscot Theatre. For more information, call 942-3333.