Lawson Taitte

Those Greater Tuna guys are tuning up for Las Vegas. Because it's such a great place to raise a family.

Brenda Ladd

Jaston Williams and Joe Sears in Tuna Does Vegas

Jaston Williams and Joe Sears have been touring the country as the denizens of Tuna, their fictional West Texas town, since they opened their first show in 1981. Every so often, they concoct another sequel.

Their fourth show, Tuna Does Vegas, premiered in Galveston last year and had a short run in the performers' hometown of Austin. They'll try out a revised and expanded version for Casa Mañana at Bass Performance Hall beginning Tuesday.

They want to have the new show polished to perfection before they take it to Sin City itself. For a good long while, they hope.

"We've been on tour so long, I'm kind of spent. The road has just done me in," Mr. Sears says. He would like to stay in one place and still have work. "In Las Vegas, if you have a hit show, you can sit down for several months at a time."

Mr. Williams' adopted son has a small daughter he helps care for, and Mr. Sears adopted a son three years ago. Both performers would like the chance to bring their families out to Nevada for extended periods in which they wouldn't be going from one town to another.

"I had never imagined that my career would end up in the desert in a dress, but I've no problem at all with the idea of staying in Las Vegas. When I was out there, I went to a Bavarian beer garden where the clientele was all locals, and I thought, 'This is not what you think of when your hear of Vegas,' " Mr. Williams says. "We just need a picture of Pearl and Vera where people get off their airplanes, and they will flock to us."

Aunt Pearl Burras and Vera Carp, of course, are two of the characters that Mr. Sears and Mr. Williams, respectively, have immortalized. If there's anybody left in Texas – or the country – who hasn't seen one of the Greater Tuna shows, it might be well to explain that the two actors each portray about a dozen different citizens of Tuna during the course of each show.

Amazingly quick changes of costume allow us to believe, for instance, in the individuality of such diverse figures as dog rescuer Petey Fisk, gun shop owner Didi Snavely and that crusader for public purity Vera – all avatars of Mr. Williams. Of course, part of the fun is seeing the two actors donning dresses to be funny, echoing centuries of British stage humor.

The original Greater Tuna got its start on Austin's East Sixth Street. Within four years it had multiple productions, in addition to the tour starring the creators. The most frequently produced script in the United States in 1985, it's still in the top 20, according to Mr. Sears.

"Being up there with Tennessee Williams is wonderful," he purrs.

The successor, A Tuna Christmas, netted Mr. Sears a Tony Award nomination in 1995. (He lost to Ralph Fiennes' Hamlet – pretty classy.) The Tuna shows have also had an HBO special and two command performances in the first Bush White House.

Like the Christmas show, the third, Red, White and Tuna, commemorated a holiday, the Fourth of July. So when Mr. Sears and Mr. Williams and their director and co-writer Ed Howard started tossing about the idea of a new installment, Mr. Sears' first thought was a Halloween theme. Then somebody asked if they had ever played Vegas. They hadn't – but that set them thinking.

"The idea of taking these people we have been playing for years and putting them in a new environment was irresistible," Mr. Williams says. "Part of the fun is getting them all there. It was such a joy to realize that Vera has a gambling habit! These people who have spent a lifetime criticizing other people's foibles have a few themselves."

Mr. Williams went out to Vegas for a few days to do some research, and people laughed, he says, when he stayed for a month. Funny situations kept falling in his lap. He knew he'd find plenty of material the minute he saw the tattooed professional bridesmaid.

"We wandered from wedding chapel to wedding chapel. We saw the humor, but these people were very respectful. They wanted you to have a good wedding," Mr. Williams says. "It is kind of scary that they didn't see the humor in it."

Talking to the staff at one of the sleaziest hotels in Las Vegas resulted in the creation of hotel manager Anna Conda (Mr. Williams) and her security guard Shot (Mr. Sears), who frequently tells the story about the time Frank Sinatra accidentally shot him in the posterior.

"And of course we had to have dueling Elvises," Mr. Williams adds.

The process of actually putting a show together has grown more relaxed since the first Greater Tuna developed out of a party skit 27 years ago. The three creators get together and talk about their general notions before Mr. Williams goes off and knocks out a first draft. Only then, he says, do the ideas really start to flow.

"We all used to sit down together like the writers on the old Dick Van Dyke Show," Mr. Williams says. "Used to, we would fight tooth and nail. We've been together so long now, we're too old to fight."

The starting point of Tuna Does Vegas is that Bertha Bumiller (Mr. Sears) and Arles Struvie (Mr. Williams), who have discovered love over the course of the three previous shows, decide to go to Vegas to celebrate an anniversary. The news goes out on the Tuna radio station, OKKK, and soon everybody in town has desert fever.

In Fort Worth, they'll be adding a new scene to the show in which Tasty Kreme waitresses Helen and Inita head out to Nevada to become showgirls. It's a daunting concept to anybody who has seen them in A Tuna Christmas.

"We measure the success of our shows by fun. And we have had more fun working on this new one than in the others put together," Mr. Sears says. "It keeps us busy. We never phone in a performance, and I am tickled when I read a review that says Joe and Jaston are still giving their Broadway performances."

Soon the boys could be bragging that they are still giving their Vegas performances while taking the show on the road – except that the plan seems to be that what happens in Tuna Does Vegas stays in Vegas. They'll use that as their base and venture on the road only around the holidays with A Tuna Christmas.

So Tuna fans who don't like traveling to Nevada should make sure they see this one while Mr. Sears and Mr. Williams are still tinkering with it. Once those posters of Vera and Pearl go up in the airport, it might be the Strip or nowhere.

Plan your life
Tuna Does Vegas runs Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. through March 30 at Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth. $30 to $75. 817-332-2272, www.casamanana.org.