Playwright: Douglas Carter Beane. At: Kid Brooklyn Productions at The Den Theatre, 1333 N. Milwaukee Ave. Tickets: www.brownpapertickets.com/event/379775; $15-20. Runs through: July 7
"The little dog laughed/To see such sport/And the dish ran away with the spoon." Douglas Carter Beane's play borrowing its title from the fourth line of that classic nursery rhyme suggests that tabloid fodder is "such sport," as his play follows the tumult of a closeted movie star, his overdramatic no-nonsense agent, the rent boy he falls for and that rent boy'sgirlfriend.
Sounds like the makings of a farce, but Beane's humor is far from situational, coming more from his razor-sharp wit. Each of the characters gets a handful of killer lines, especially the snarky agent, Diane (Stephanie Monday), a lethal character mix of cynicism, didacticism, hopeless romanticism, Hollywood BS, wisdom, poetry and cold hard truth. Monday exaggerates her character greatly, and it's rarely dull when she's on stage. She adds theatricality to what's otherwise a very introspective play from Kid Brooklyn Productions.
The other three characters do much more soul-baring. Truthfully, the scope of the drama is especially intimate and Beane very much wants to make some sense out of the fog that sexual identity can so often be. Mitchell Green (Carl Lindberg) is a movie star, yes, but we have no context for that. Instead, the play presents him to us as just a man torn between career ambition and exploring who he is and what he wants. His young lover Alex (Michael Manocchio), struggling with the demoralizing path he's chosen for himself and his denial of his own sexual identity, has no idea of Green's stardom at first and is drawn to him inexplicably. Movies, Hollywood tinselthese are influential forces, complicating factors, even a satirical lens with which to view the play's essentially human ideas, but not its core.
Everything takes a little bit of time to really lock into a zone, but by some point in the second act, all four actors have hit their stride and the balance between humor and thoughtful reflection feels more natural. Fittingly, the play has its own identity crisis in this sense, but it's unquestionably smart and surprisingly perceptive.
Director and Kid Brooklyn founder Evan F. Caccioppoli keeps the staging visually interesting and uses it to help create smoother transitions between the play's external scenes and internal moments, placing certain scenes closer to the audience and using lighting to make the distinctions between character asides and actual dialogue.
Given the way Kid Brooklyn has marketed their production and chosen to emphasize the Hollywood components and the play's humor, audiences might be disappointed that The Little Dog Laughed never reaches a comedic apex. Or, perhaps they will be pleasantly surprised that this production does especially well with the stuff that isn't meant to be funny. That's just the nature of a play that has some contradictory components. Yet Beane enjoys playing with that irony in this play, and this production hits on some of the discoveries he undoubtedly intended to make when he wrote it.
I could see more venerable theater companies taking this material and knocking it completely out of the park, but Kid Brooklyn Productions finds enough moments of both the hilarious and the profound in this rangy play for its take to be considered a success.