Mark Mackie has walked a mile in the shoes of the scorned boyfriend character he’s playing in Lawrence Community Theatre’s production of “Beau Jest.”

“I personally dated a girl whose mother didn’t approve of me because I was an actor,” he says. “She never hired a boyfriend to pose for me. At least I did not have to live through that.”

But that’s precisely what he must confront as the gentile love interest of Sarah Goldman, whose Jewish parents are hoping she’ll marry within her faith. To please them, she invents a boyfriend who is both Jewish and a doctor. Her imaginary beau works fine until her eager parents insist on meeting him.

Trapped, she hires a stand-in named Bob from an escort service. Much to Sarah’s dismay, when Bob arrives at her apartment for dinner with her parents, she discovers he’s not Jewish. He once played a role in “Fiddler on the Roof,” but that hardly qualifies.

But alas, her parents are at the door, and there’s no time to back out.

Charles Decedue, left, who plays Abe, and Peggy Sampson, as his wife, Miriam, banter during a scene from Beau

Complicating matters are Sarah’s therapist brother, who suspects something’s fishy from the start, and her “real” disgruntled boyfriend, played by Mackie.

“He’s aware from the get-go what’s going on, that she’s hiring this actor because her parents don’t approve of him. He’s aware of it, and he’s very, very angry about it,” Mackie says. “But he loves her, and he just has to let her do what she wants to make her happy.”

The zany show accomplishes what the theater always tries to do in January: “give our audiences a comedy, something to take their minds off of the fact that the holidays are past and that it’s cold and gray outside,” says Peggy Sampson, who plays Sarah’s mother, Miriam. “Even though it’s about the Jewish faith and about dating and parents and so on, in essence, it’s a love story, and it’s funny.”

Director Charles Whitman seconds that contention.

“In a comedy, you always take kind of a tough situation for the characters, and the actors are able to turn it into something about which we can laugh,” he says. “So the underpinnings are serious, but the overlay, of course, is we get to enjoy the fact that they escape in the end.”

Along the way, the family introduces Sarah’s fake beau and the audience to the Passover Seder, one of the most widely observed of all Jewish customs. The cast consulted theater volunteer Judith Scheff for accuracy.

“She is the one who taught us how to do the Seder meal, how to handle the matzo, how to dip the parsley, what would be on the table, what would not be on the table. And it has been fascinating,” says Sampson, a Lawrence Community Theatre veteran.

Beau

In her 15th show at the venue, she plays a somewhat stereotypical Jewish mother. But in many ways her character is universal.

“Like all mothers, she wants what’s best for her daughter. But like all mothers, her idea of what’s best for her daughter is what was best for her when she was a girl – and that is to get married, and preferably to someone within the Jewish faith,” Sampson says. “And she is doing her best to steer her in that direction.”

All of that parental pressure makes life difficult for Sarah’s original boyfriend, played with delicacy by Mark Mackie.

“It has been a little bit difficult. It is a comedy, and having to try to find the comedy in that when you are the scorned boyfriend is a bit harder,” Mackie says. “But it really is an up-tempo show. A lot of the cast has a really good ability for timing of comedy. It makes a show like this a lot easier to do.”