REVIEWS ...
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Play's a dark look at pain we all hide
At GableStage, a dark comedy peeks beneath the pretty surfaces of showbiz and the masks we wear in life.
By Christine Dolen
cdolen@herald.com
It's an edgy comedy, a little dark, sometimes scathingly funny. On its surface, Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed is about the deeply ingrained artifice of showbiz.
But dig a little more -- as Beane, director Joseph Adler and an artfully amusing GableStage cast do -- and you discover a play about the masks everyone wears, and the pain they hide.
To a man and woman, the characters in Beane's play are willing to do what needs to be done to get their heart's desire. Whatever that happens to be at any given moment.
Mitchell (Todd Allen Durkin), a television actor who dreams of movie stardom, is so accustomed to professional pretending that he has no problem imagining himself as a straight man who just prefers to sleep with guys. His agent Diane (Pilar Uribe), a lesbian who gladly sacrifices any personal life to the far larger turn-on of deal-making, would clearly knock off her own mother if it would help further her career.
Alex (Justin Sims), a club kid who earns rent money at $200 per male trick, is drifting through life in the way some younger guys do. So is Ellen (Valerie Stanford), his sometime "girlfriend," who has taken a credit card souvenir from the sugar-daddy author who dumped her.
Beane has the four lives intersect and connect, sometimes predictably (Mitchell and Alex meet when the star gets a hankering for some male companionship), sometimes improbably (Diane's solution to the pickle all find themselves in, due to Mitchell and Alex developing feelings for each other). The script, which also comments on dramatic structure, is full of dead-on insights into the sometimes brutal realities of the theater world and moviemaking.
On Lyle Baskin's handsome set, its centerpiece a hotel room with an expansive view of the Manhattan skyline, Adler keeps the action breezy, fluid and funny. Yes, there's a fleeting nude scene (something that would be more remarkable if it didn't happen at GableStage), but this one is played for laughs.
Each of the actors gives a richly detailed performance.
Christine Dolen is The Miami Herald's theater critic.
