Traditional America is under assault: Obama’s henchmen drag Ted Nugent and Chuck Norris off to Guantanamo Bay for “reeducation” just as the “Nuge” predicted; homosexuals trample the religious rights of their countrymen by adopting their most cherished institution; a New Age counselor uses puppet therapy to salvage the marriages of narcissistic liberals while pudgy, middle-aged suburbanites form swingers clubs in the Heartland, and Hollywood producers sap the national intellect with salacious and mindless science fiction epics.

The Bay Area’s sketch comedy juggernaut Dangerous Neighbors makes its second appearance in the Santa Cruz Fringe Festival with a new collection of pieces saluting America’s precipitous and squalid decline into political and cultural dementia. As the once glorious republic’s political consciousness devolves into a fulminating, paranoid bitch-fest, its entertainment industry stages a shabby bacchanalia of mediocrity to divert its citizens from their impending descent into hell, and the Neighbors, as always, are there to chronicle the event for future historians.

As the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s Wallace Baine put it, “If satire were a weapon, Dangerous Neighbors would be a heavily armed Doomsday cult.” The group has been assaulting the collective consciousness of the Bay Area for twenty years, and has appeared at political conferences, universities, and nightclubs. In Jefferson at Guantanamo, the troupe turns its jaundiced eye on the withering body politic of the “greatest nation on Earth,” and nobody is secure. “Each skit offers a sick and sometimes twisted glimpse of an absurd universe, and divides the audience into two camps,” wrote Metro Santa Cruz’s Sarah Phelan, “those of the shocked gasps and those of the booming belly laughs.” Which camp will you be in?

Jefferson at Guantanamo is written by Bill Burman, and performed by Bill Burman, Eric Conly, Suzanne Schrag, Mike Steitz, Bob Vickers, and lighting and sound is by Paul Anderson.