Outside, it's Ojai in all its quaintly sophisticated glory. Inside, it's Tuna, Texas, where the corn is high.

"Greater Tuna," a show that digs up the dirt on very small-town Texas, is piling up the laughs at the Ojai Art Center.

"Tuna" has a suitably shambling presence, evolving as it did from satirical improv by creators Joe Sears, Jaston Williams and Ed Howard.

As Ojai director Laura Schreiner notes, "The hilarity begins when small minds take over in small towns."

And there are plenty of belly laughs to share, beginning with the physical joke of three actors playing 21 roles, disappearing briefly behind scenes to emerge as one after another.

They weren't quite lickety-split changes on opening night, but they were fast enough to be funny, bolstered of course by the impersonations that followed.

The names of the characters broadly hint at the trowel-it-on approach: Arles Struvie, Didi Snavely, Thurston Wheelis, Harold Dean Lattimer and the entire Bumiller clan.

All of them are part of the community where Smut Snatchers of the New Order rail against certain books in the schools, and even certain words in the dictionary, and where a darker group proclaims that it's dedicated to making a better world, for "the right kind of people."

In the original long-running productions of "Greater Tuna," Sears and Williams played all of the roles.

In Ojai's modified version, Michael Nader and Dave Matzke play the Sears and Williams roles of Arles Struvie and Thurston Wheelis, co-hosts of the folksy talk show on Radio Station OKKK.

Both have extensive professional credits, including Nader's early days as a surfer in "Beach Party" and later work as Dex Dexter in "Dynasty" and a decade of work in the daytime series "All My Children" and Matzke's decades as actor, writer and director in theater and TV.

The third player in Ojai is local veteran Doug Friedlander, who joins the two men in their radio program as a silly sound man and breaks out with a flourish as Bertha Bumiller, mother to three odd siblings.

Nader manages to make most of his characters into one of the village idiots, though there are telling variations.

Stanley Bumiller, who just returned from reform school, has a dark side; his sister Charlene has her own problems but turns out to be a poet.

Jody, is a true (greatly exaggerated) teen. He is surprisingly convincing as the pink-chiffoned society woman who's determined to wipe out smut and the deadly-dull Humane Society member.

Matzke roams through a bunch of good ol' boy portrayals, from dopey to ominous, and as Rev. Spikes delivers a very funny eulogy for the late Judge Roscoe Buckner that manages to use just about every cliche conceivable without ever saying anything about the man himself.

Friedlander validates the introduction of a third player into the mix with his full-blown, softhearted Bertha, who manages to be totally frazzled while still maintaining a look of down-home chic.

Ojai's "Tuna" doesn't yet have the frantic pace of the original — that one extra actor may alleviate some of the rush — but it has the requisite silliness and a cast that can handle it.

— E-mail Rita Moran at ritamoran@earthlink.net.