207.
CRAVING FOR TRAVEL
It’s
increasingly likely that in the age of Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, and the
like, the average person planning a trip will avoid calling or visiting a
travel agent directly and book their own flights, cruises, hotels, and
excursions. Travel agents still abound, of course, but they struggle for an
edge in a business that has gone so thoroughly digital. Nor are they likely to
enjoy the kinds of classily appointed offices assigned to the two rival agents
in CRAVING FOR TRAVEL, the moderately funny but terrifically performed new
farce by Greg Edwards and Andy Samberg at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre. These
folks aren’t your ordinary storefront agents, however, with one desk crowded behind the
other and stacked with brochures and other agency paraphernalia. They’re luxury
agents, a niche that, according to Jim Strong, one of the leaders of the
industry, is booming because of the high-class personal attention lavished on today’s
growing ranks of deep-pocketed travelers. Mr. Strong commissioned and produced
the play, so I suspect there’s a passel of truth hidden under its comically
exaggerated premises and heightened theatricality.
Michelle Ragusa. Photo: Joan Marcus.
Set designer Charlie Corcoran has split
the stage into two attractive offices in different buildings for Joanne and
Gary, former spouses, who are competing with each other for the industry’s
Globel (not a spelling error but a pun!) Prize as travel agent of the year. Thom Sesma plays Gary and
Michelle Ragusa (recently of DISASTER!) is Joanne, but they also play around 30
other characters, mainly their wide variety of clients. The piece is
a tour de force opportunity for its resourceful stars, who do a remarkably effective job of altering
their voices and, Mr. Sesma especially, facial and bodily expressions, to
instantly capture whoever they are portraying. Since the same characters
reappear frequently, it’s something of a feat for the actors, without any
costume or makeup changes, to immediately take on the speech and physical
mannerisms of their characters, old and young, male and female, and to do so in
such distinct ways that the audience is never in doubt as to who’s talking. The
actors’ versatility and energy is memorable, but, while there are some funny highlights,
the humor isn’t consistent or abundant enough to regularly break the laugh
barrier,
Except for a few minutes at the end
when Joanne and Gary share the same icebound space (as the result of a losing bet), the
conversations are entirely on the telephone, cell and landline, with Joanne and
Gary talking both to each other and to their clients in rapid-fire
conversations broken up into bits and pieces as the phone calls keep coming in. The 85-minute, intermissionless play operates something like an extended sketch on
“Saturday Night Live,” but very cleverly manages to weave together all the apparently
unrelated phone calls into what turns out to be a surprisingly well-integrated
plot. At first we listen in on the calls as Gary and Joanne wrestle with the demanding problems posed by their eccentric clients’ next to impossible requests, but as
the problems keep mounting they each find ways of using one client to help
another, until they pull off some rather world-class feats of travel agent legerdemain.
Among the many clients is the super-wealthy
Wolf Davenport, who wants to take the U.S.S.
Intrepid for a spin around Manhattan; Cliff, a handsome, sophisticated, jet-setting humanitarian on whom Joanne has a crush; an elderly couple who want to travel to celebrate their 60th anniversary party at Rick’s American Café in Casablanca, which they
think is a real place; a stereotypical, bigoted Southern senator with influence
in the Defense Department who’s having trouble getting into a hotel; a
Lithuanian representative trying to get American tourists to her country; a
Reggae-singing Jamaican selling a scuba diving excursion; and an American
trapped in China in one crisis after another but whom Joanne refuses to help
because he booked his trip with Travelocity. Used for comic fodder are the Kardashians,
Florida, Keebler cookie family, the Nieman-Marcus family, a quadriplegic agent, a crooked
Russian seeking to book a trip to Aspen for which he says he'll make his own passports and
visas, Patti Lupone (Ms. Ragusa nails her), a family seeking a suite at a hotel
on Maui when they’re booked through the roof, an Arab
sheik, Atlantic Airlines (a phone announcement says, “Due to your feedback, all
of our planes now have seatbelts”), a honeymooner fed up with her husband’s
incessant cuddling, and so on. Somehow or other these threads come together in
a unified comic fabric, even though some loose ends are left hanging.
Co-author Sandberg’s direction keeps
the pace lively, the jokes spinning, the atmosphere bright, and the
performances focused. Too much of the material remains cute and mildly amusing,
more suitable for the smile-meter than the laugh-meter, but undemanding playgoers might wish to book passage aboard this show. Bon voyage.
