Since taking over the artistic leadership of the Caldwell Theatre this summer, Clive Cholerton has directed three very satisfying productions and one exquisite staged reading. With a start like that, the natural question was when would his string of successes end.

The answer has arrived with the painfully unfunny Chemical Imbalance, a spoof of Victorian theater and specifically Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. With it, the Caldwell’s streak is over with a resounding thud.

Maybe now the company can move forward without the suspense hanging over it. Unfortunately, the cast of Chemical Imbalance has to keep showing up and performing this anemic twaddle for the next four weeks.

It would be unfair to extrapolate from a single show, but maybe comedy is not Cholerton’s forte. Of course, comedy is highly subjective, but encouraging a cast of proven talents to perform in an overly broad, woodenly artificial style is the surest way to stifle laughs.

Then again, one wonders whatever possessed Cholerton to select this witless farce by Lauren Wilson in the first place. Brought east from San Francisco, it pours farce over the classic Robert Louis Stevenson yarn about good and evil lurking within us all, in an adaptation without much purpose or point of view.

Like the actors and their two-dimensional performances, scenic designer Tim Bennett presumably gave Cholerton what he was after — flat, flimsy tongue-in-cheek, sliding set pieces, which approximate locations in and around the home and lab of Henry Jekyll.

Likeable, if bland Tom Wahl plays the good doctor and, after an injection of concentrated evil, he transforms himself into malevolent Mr. Hyde. His primary aid in that metamorphosis is a set of buck teeth that would make Jerry Lewis proud.

Among the game, but trying-too-hard cast is Erin Joy Schmidt as Jekyll’s Sapphic sister Ambrosia and Angie Radosh as his mom, both upstaged by the wigs Carol Marks has devised for them. John Felix is reduced to a sight gag as Lady Throckmortonshire, though the character gives costumer Alberto Arroyo an excuse to design an amusingly over-the-top frock and hat.

Mirroring Jekyll and Hyde is tiny Tiffany-Leigh Moskow as good and evil twins, Penelope and Calliope. Assigned to enter and announce which sister she is at the moment, she manages to mine that single joke for more than it is worth. It is hard to tell the point of Amy Elane Anderson’s character, who keeps losing parts of her dress and undergarments as the evening lumbers on. Still, she and her breakaway wardrobe are the only reason to wish the play went beyond its brief, but not brief enough, 80-minute length.

Presumably Cholerton had in mind an evening of mindless fluff, something reminiscent of Charles Ludlam’s bygone Ridiculous Theatrical Company. That turns out to be a deceptively tall order, and the results at the Caldwell are simply embarrassing.