With its layers stripped down, “Magic Mic” is more than just a slapstick comedy show about busting it down sexual-style. Rising senior theatre student Frankie Alvarez Lora X and recent School of Dramatic Arts graduate Sam Pozen serve as the writers and performers of an original comedy performance inspired by the “Magic Mike” film franchise that deals with friendship, ambition, pride and — of course — male stripping.

An installment in the esteemed Hollywood Fringe Festival, “Magic Mic” graced the stage of the Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre in a meta-contemporary look at the lives and dreams of Frank and Sam as they face their final college comedy show. 

However, graduation isn’t the only precipice the duo faces at the end of the show — the two, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, are staring down a move to New York that would seal the deal on a step taken toward a career in comedy post-grad.

“Sam and I have always been very inspired by comedic pieces, and I think we see a lot of [them] at USC, but we always wanted to kind of take a spin at making something of our own,” Alvarez Lora said. “Hollywood Fringe was coming up and he suggested maybe we should try to write something for this … We always wanted to do something, we just needed the opportunity to force ourselves to sit down and write.”

And write they did, for several months for up to four hours a day, taking an entire month to rehearse what they had written. The show’s plot came about from a fateful movie binge in which Alvarez Lora and Pozen worked their way through the “Magic Mike” trilogy and walked away feeling connected to motifs of both friendship and the terror in pursuing one’s dreams. 

“We were throwing around ideas about talking about how much it kind of sucks trying to make something out of yourself, especially as a comedy person, because it’s so awkward and uncomfortable to put yourself out there within that context,” Pozen said. “We were joking about, ‘What if we incorporated “Magic Mike” and stripping into this kind of sincere piece?’”

The show’s sincerity is exactly what makes the viewing experience so unexpected. Despite the relative lightheartedness of the show’s premise and source material, the core of “Magic Mic” is vulnerability — the courage it takes to undress one’s emotions in front of a crowd, or worse, one’s best friend. 

“We wanted to create something that’s comedy, but not just slapstick. It’s a storyline that has a hook to it, we never wanted to just make a straight-up sketch,” Alvarez Lora said.

Judith Shelton, an assistant professor of theatre practice in comedy, was under the impression that “Magic Mic” would be a straight-forward comedy experience, something more akin to stand-up with “2 mics, 2 guys.” However, what they received was more complex than two comedians cracking jokes for an hour.

“It was really, really good. It was so funny, it was emotional. It was contemporary, meaning what they’re going through right now in their lives. And it was rascally!” Shelton said.

Similarly, Andie Kirby, a rising senior studying journalism and theatre, was expecting a more direct adherence to the show’s source material, saying that she was most surprised by “the fact that there wasn’t more nudity.” 

“I thought it would have come earlier in the show,” Kirby said, “But I was pleased when it did. It felt worth it.”

While the show does have an emotional arc of the two friends working through their respective fears regarding their futures, there’s no lack of strip-tastic humor. Alvarez Lora and Pozen’s rehearsals included a striptease routine for the show’s finale choreographed by recent SDA graduate Jed Levinson along with several tries at tearing their tank tops. 

When these rehearsals came to fruition on the stage at the tail-end of the show, it evoked a visceral reaction from the audience, a reaction of laughter and screams — of terror or delight, it was hard to discern, but a strong reaction all the same. 

With a spectacular finale to a heartfelt inspection of what it takes to make it in the comedy industry side-by-side with one’s best friend, “Magic Mic” succeeded in subverting the typical comedy experience with earnest honesty.

“When people look at me and Frankie, they’re not like, ‘Oh yes, strippers.’ So we were committed to making this sort of cool, but also, like, obviously stupid. It would be surprising to people, which keeps them entertained. That worked out,” Pozen said. “We wanted to do something we were proud of.”