Plays that imitate sitcoms typically get a bad rap. If playwrights are going to throw up the same stuff on stage that you would normally see on TV, why not just stay home?

But TV sitcoms often don't take on serious issues of faith. And when they do, like the 2006 NBC series The Book of Daniel ( where a pill-popping Episcopal minister talked with an apparition of Jesus ) , protesting religious groups do all they can to scare off advertisers to get the show cancelled.

Deborah Zoe Laufer's play End Days, now in its regional premiere at Evanston's Next Theatre, is glaringly stocked with characters and situations straight out of a sitcom. But Laufer uses the laugh track-sitcom pacing to good effect in dramatizing a family increasingly torn apart by ideological differences and paralysis.

The Stein family is comically dysfunctional. The out-of-work father Arthur ( William Dick ) spends days napping at the kitchen table—seemingly unable to do simple things like grocery shopping or bathing. Mother Syvia ( Laura T. Fisher ) is a Christian evangelist who protests outside of porno shops and has a one-on-one friendship with Jesus ( Joseph Wycott, who nonchalantly follows Sylvia around doing mundane tasks like toting Bible stacks and buying Starbucks coffee ) .

With such parents, it's no surprise that daughter Rachel ( Carolyn Faye Kramer ) has turned into a rebellious Goth girl complete with white-fright makeup. Yet it's Rachel's bitterness ( and exemplary math skills ) that attracts her gawky classmate, Nelson Steinberg ( Adam Shalzi ) , who plays the guitar ( not very well ) and wears an Elvis Presley jumpsuit everywhere he goes. In a scientific contrast to her mother, Rachel starts to have visions of the physicist Stephen Hawking ( Wycott again, with hilariously accurate electronic vocal inflections ) .

Next's production is a solid effort under Shade Murray's direction. Shalzi is an enjoyably wide-eyed agent of change as Nelson, and he plays off well against Kramer's funny petulance as Rachel and Dick's befuddled immobilization as the dad Arthur. Fisher's depiction of mother Sylvia is thoughtfully grounded and not too extreme ( even when she is personally conversing with Wycott's great low-key Jesus ) .

Some may find Laufer's deliberately quirky characters to be cloying. Others also might find Laufer's use of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as an easy crutch to explain away her characters' motivations.

But in the oddball world that Laufer conjures up, these devices only add a touch of gravitas to the playwright's questioning of how so many Americans have turned their backs on science and logical reasoning in the 21st century. End Days is clearly a work that seeks to reach out across this country's religious divides, so the sitcom-styles Laufer employs is not only approachable, but entirely appropriate.