74. SUMMER
SHORTS SERIES B
Once
again, 59E59 is offering two series of one-act plays by established playwrights,
Series A and Series B, each program containing three new American premieres. I
caught up with Series B before getting to see Series A (next week), but if
Series B is any indication, the plays don’t seem to be linked by any specific
theme, other than the need to connect with other members of the species. What
links them more than any theme is a general air of comedic cuteness. There is nary a
whiff of danger or true originality.
Marian Fontana’s FALLING SHORT,
directed by Alexander Dinelaris, begins the evening with the increasingly
familiar sight of someone sitting at a laptop. This is Lee (Kendra Mylnechuk),
a pretty young woman who makes her living as a food writer, and who is trying
to meet someone via an Internet dating service. This, too, is a familiar trope.
The comments being typed into the computer are expressed through dialogue,
first with a performer (Shane Patrick Kearns) who plays multiple prospects by
morphing vocally and physically from role to role, and then with a single
character, Nate (J.J. Kandel), a struggling actor who is winning enough to land
a date at a Williamsburg restaurant with Lee. This pushes us into FIRST DATE
territory (the musical that just opened on Broadway and that I’ll be seeing
tonight).
Since he’s late in arriving, Lee engages in clever
repartee with the sardonic, gay waiter (Mr. Kearns), and when Nate
does get there, his presence belies what he said about himself on the dating
site (the title gives a clue to the first lie). Soon there is pleasant chit
chat about truth and lies, and romance begins to bloom. If you’re waiting for a
big surprise, or some dramaturgic breakthrough, forget it. The surprise, in
fact, is that there are no surprises. Well performed, it’s sweet, it’s cute, it’s
here, it’s gone.
In CHANGE, by Paul Weitz, directed
by Billy Hopkins, we’re in the apartment of Ted (Alex Manette) and Carla
(Allison Daugherty), a yuppie couple in their thirties with a couple of “little
monsters,” as they lovingly call them, who have a guest over for the evening. The
guest is a friend from college and just out of rehab, the skanky but handsome Jordan (Michael D.
Dempsey), tattooed and greasy haired in his sleeveless black Dead Kennedys polo shirt. Jordan
goes out to get some weed, which Ted and Carol, now responsible parents, have
given up but are unable to resist when the subject arises, and Jordan blurts out
before he goes that, while he likes both “cock” and “pussy,” he actually
prefers the former. He’s late coming back and when he does, he brings with him
not grass but packets of white powder. The trio snorts the stuff, and gets
blasted, far more than if it were cocaine, which it isn’t. Now, under the spell
of what is actually heroine, they drift into slow motion incapacity, unable to
even attend to the offstage needs of their little monsters, and triangular sexual
possibilities seem about to open up, with Ted revealing a proclivity we might
have expected, and Carla ripe for anything. Just then, Jordan has to leave, and
the good parents are left in their drug-induced stupor. It’s very much like
what a student playwright, asked to do an assignment for a playwriting class
about something he knows, might have come up with. The performances are
fine but the play scores just a few points on the cuteness scale, and is
superficial and unimportant, even if it's meant to put young middle class strivers under the microscope.
In the evening’s closer, PINE CONE
MOMENT, written by Alan Zweibel and directed by Fred Berner, the ages of the
characters move forward by a few decades, but the computers are out again as
Emma (Caroline Lagerfelt) and Harry (Brian Reddy) conduct a texting
relationship, as in the first play on the program. Each has lost their
spouse several years back and they are having a senior citizen affair over the
Internet, although they’ve known each other for years. Standing behind each one
and giving advice are their late spouses, Bunny (Camille Saviola) and Brian
(James Murtaugh). Brian, even in the afterlife, continues handling his golf
club, and Bunny . . . well, Bunny needs to be seen to be believed. She is a gum-chewing
fireplug of a woman, short, stout, and fully packed into a tight red dress,
bedecked with jewelry, and topped with a blazing bonnet of bright, blonde,
bleached hair. She carries herself with broad where a broad should be broad
attitude and keeps sitting on Harry’s knee so he can "knead her ass," a request
that breeds the obvious pun, not once but several times. To cut to the chase, love
blooms among the ruins, there’s a vigorous polka set to "The Lonely Goatherd" from THE SOUND
OF MUSIC, and you hope neither dancer has a myocardial infarction before the
lights go out. Cute enough? (Oh, talking about cuteness, I should note that the play also includes a bit around Kyu Sakamoto's 1963 hit, "Sukiyaki," a number I'd completely forgotten. Time to check that tune out again!)
Series B, which I’ll visit next
week, has plays by Neil LaBute, Lucas Hnath, and Tina Howe, none of whom brings
cuteness to mind.
