Rick Miller plays a nightmarish salesman in his new one-man show Hardsell. (Michael Cooper/Canadian Stage Company)

If acting is just another kind of sales job, then Rick Miller has pitched some outstanding products. First, he offered us his crazily inspired Shakespeare-meets-Simpsons spoof, MacHomer. Then he gave us one sweet deal of a satire, playing the figurehead of Christianity in the funny, thought-provoking Bigger Than Jesus.

Equipped with a Twitter-sized attention span, the main character in Hardsell is as stable as Heath Ledger's Joker and as cuddly as Ayn Rand.

Now, Miller is hoping audiences will buy a dark character that's a lot less lovable than Homer Simpson and a far cry from Jesus Christ. In Hardsell, his new solo show opening April 16 at Toronto's Canadian Stage, the 39-year-old actor introduces us to Arnie, a glib, slippery showman/salesman for whom everything is a commodity. Lacking a political-correctness filter and equipped with a Twitter-sized attention span, Arnie's as stable as Heath Ledger's Joker and as cuddly as Ayn Rand.

"He's Rick Miller's alter ego, dark twin, shadow self," says the wiry, blue-eyed Miller, who combines a pop star's good looks with the mischievous twinkle of a born comedian. "He's the primitive id unleashed onto the stage, unafraid of provoking, able to say things that Rick Miller can't say."

"Rick is an incredibly polite, gracious and sweet guy," adds a smiling Daniel Brooks, Hardsell's director and co-writer. "This character is not so polite and not so gracious."

The two men are taking a lunch break from rehearsals at Canadian Stage's Berkeley Street Theatre. Hardsell is their second collaboration after Bigger Than Jesus, which premiered in 2004, won a trio of Dora Awards and has toured across Canada and internationally. That success prompted Brooks, artistic director of Toronto's peripatetic Necessary Angel Theatre Company, to suggest a new play about the way advertising and promotion have seeped into every corner of our lives.

It was a theme they'd already begun to address in Bigger Than Jesus, Brooks says. "There was one angle where we were looking at Jesus as a kind of brand and the cross as a logo."

Actor Rick Miller. (Canadian Stage Company)

Brooks's suggestion resonated with Miller, who makes the bulk of his living selling MacHomer and his other touring shows: "I spend most of my time, including the time right now, promoting myself and promoting my brand." His role in Hardsell inflates Miller's salesman side to nightmarish proportions. Among other things, the huckster character is a way for the actor to address his own sense of hypocrisy. "For example, I'm someone who has problems with Disney products, who doesn't let his kids watch Disney," Miller says, "and yet I also host a show for Disney" – namely, the Just For Laughs TV series on Disney-owned ABC.

Like Miller, the 50-year-old Brooks is a father of two and views the subject of marketing partly as a concerned parent. "I remember taking my five-year-old to kindergarten and there's a bus stop out front with virtually pornographic advertising on it – soft porn, titillating," he recalls. "Now, I'm no prude, but if you have no choice with what you want your five-year-old to be exposed to, you feel a lack of control. And it's disturbing."

Miller agrees. "One of the main concerns we have is how boardrooms of very smart people are trying to get into our kids' heads in ways that are not so innocent."

Hardsell examines the insidiousness of advertising by letting us into the crowded head of Arnie. His is a polluted stream-of-consciousness, where the ideas of Rand or the theories of biologist Richard Dawkins bump up against all kinds of pop-culture debris, from commercial jingles to Bugs Bunny to TV bigot Archie Bunker.

A multi-media barrage à la Bigger Than Jesus, the show is like surfing the internet, Miller says. "It's jerky, things come at you, there are non-sequiturs and moments to jolt the audience." It also gives free rein to Miller's talents for mimicry and improv, blurring the divide between a comic's riffing and a salesman's patter.

"We're looking at how [as theatre artists] we're craftsmen in the same way that an advertising man is a craftsman," Brooks says. "In fact, we use a lot of the same tricks in order to capture the attention of an audience …"

"Manipulation, deception, distraction," inserts Miller.

"Those terms carry a certain negative resonance," Brooks says, "and we're toying with that: Is it so negative? How did manipulation become such a bad word?"

"Acting on a very simple level is lying," Miller adds. "I kind of lie for a living. We're playing that lying game just like the advertisers do."

Rick Miller's one-man play MacHomer was a smash hit at fringe festivals. (MacHomer.com)

An earlier version of the play had a tryout at the Manitoba Theatre Centre last season, where critical reaction was mixed (the Winnipeg Sun loved it, the Winnipeg Free Press not so much). Miller says they've since made some substantial changes – not least to reflect the global economic collapse that has occurred in the interim.

"One of the initial ideas in the show was that this culture of consumerism, this sort of delirium that we were in, was going to lead to trouble," Brooks says. "Now we have to contend with that reality."

"People tend to be more aware now of certain power structures and certain flaws in the system that they maybe wouldn't have been aware of before, when things were going well," Miller adds, "so we're feeding into that. We're also saying that, even in this climate, there are still parasites out there trying to make money off your loss."

Those who know Miller only as the MacHomer man – or the guy who does that priceless 26-singer parody of Bohemian Rhapsody on YouTube – might be surprised to find him teamed with Brooks, the distinguished Siminovitch Prize-winner known for directing the cerebral plays of John Mighton and the surreal monologues of Daniel MacIvor. In fact, Montreal native Miller started as a legit actor and has had a long association with avant-garde master Robert Lepage. (He's a cast member of Lepage's latest mammoth project, Lipsynch.) Miller first met Brooks when they both appeared in Lepage's film version of Mighton's play Possible Worlds.

MacHomer, meanwhile, was originally just a goof Miller came up with to entertain fellow actors during a production of Macbeth. But when he took the skit to the fringe festivals it proved a smash hit. Now, 13 years and some 130 cities later, it's still in demand. He performed it in New York last month and he'll be doing it again at the Calgary International Children's Festival in May, after Hardsell closes.

Teaming with Brooks for Bigger Than Jesus gave Miller a chance to meld his wacky comic sensibilities with more serious concerns. The play used some hilarious conceits — like comparing the four Gospels to the four Beatles — as a means of critiquing the origins and mysteries of Christianity.

"There's a desire to push certain buttons that Rick Miller doesn't usually push in Simpsons-do-Macbeth kind of shows," says Miller, once again speaking of himself in the third person. "Bigger Than Jesus allowed me to engage in the world in a very different way from just making people laugh. I think we're going further with that exploration in this play."

No doubt Hardsell will tour like its predecessor, but Brooks and Miller are waiting to see how it does at Canadian Stage first. "I hope people like it," Miller says with just a hint of irony in his voice. "I hope that it sells."

Hardsell runs at the Canadian Stage Company in Toronto to May 9.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.