"Duck Hunter Shoots Angel" doesn't walk the line between reality and sensational tabloid journalism, it tromps and dances across it, trailing bits from both worlds until it's hard to determine where that line might have been.

Take the half-man, half-alligator, for instance. He's a silent figure with a remarkably expressive papier maché crocodile grin that slips in and out of the action like an attentive butler, giving a shave or a back massage. Gator Man (Vincent Fitzgerald) is the physical manifestation of a story invented to sell newspapers at the supermarket checkout stand, but he's also an accepted part of the action.

While the audience is concentrating on realism, fantasy elements creep in at the edges, like the pair of duck hunters who believe they have shot down an angel because they keep finding pieces of her in a swamp.

They're a pair of good ol' country boys — Duane (pronounced do-wayne) and Duwell (do-well) — played by Jim Tharp and Braddoc DeCaires for all the broad laughs they can scoop up. Duwell is the gullible brother and the butt of Duane's sarcasm. "The wheels are turning," scoffs Duane as Duwell concentrates hard on collecting a thought, "But the hamster died."

With these two providing chorus, the job of creating melody goes to Scott Francis Russell as a New York reporter sent south to cover the angel story — or to invent it. Turns out he's packing his own history, revealed as the memory of the Woman (Chantelle Sawa) he loved and left behind.

Playwright Mitch Albom — whose "Tuesdays With Morrie" played successfully at MVT earlier this season — eventually pulls all the story threads together into a surprise ending. Along the way, he noticeably links dialogue by repeating the closing words of the ending scene in the first lines of the one that follows.

The action is tightly managed by director Paul Mitri and played out on Karen Archibald's realistic stage set filled with large swamp trees. But to see them, we spend the evening peering through a large scrim that is used only rarely for projections.

Some of the heartfelt emotion that is found so generously in "Tuesdays With Morrie" spills over into "Angel," primarily when the reporter retreats into memory from his everyday pose of hard-bitten cynicism. But the play exists primarily for laughs based on character idiosyncrasies and absurd exaggeration.

It's a good time capped by an unexpected switch.