Playwright: Peter Sinn Nachtrieb
At: Bailiwick Repertory, 1229 W. Belmont
Phone: (773) 883-1090; $10
Runs through: Sept 19
So what do you do with a play that reads like a comic book? You STAGE it like a comic book, of course! And if you're Lee Peters, the director of this final entry in Bailiwick's 2004 pride series, you eliminate everything not consistent with its comic-book universe. Your scenery is painted to look like line drawings, your actors exhibit the stamina and agility of road runners, and your gags fly so fast we don't have time to think about their inherent weightlessness.
Audiences should not allow themselves to be fooled by the tone of high artifice permeating this oh-so-ironically named comedy, however. Buried beneath Peter Sinn Nachtrieb's theatrical fizz is both an illustration of, and commentary on, the conventions of third-generation post-Stonewall homodrama. His story recounts the progress of Ted and Linda, college chums who follow their hearts—his broken by his lover's sudden yearning for the straight life, and hers a-flutter over a potential Princess Charming on the eve of westward expansion—to San Francisco during the DotCom boom. There, they secure jobs and contemplate their futures, both emerging wiser for their discoveries.
It's nothing new for characters to analyze themselves onstage, but whenever the players depart from the dramatic action to discuss it with us as well—as when Ted marvels at a hustler's resemblance to his boyhood lover, and Linda shrugs, 'That's because this theater can't afford to hire another actor'—the storyline risks becoming tangled in its own fourth wall. And when the object of the author's focus is the gay version of Woody Allen's almighty wimp, we could soon grow as exasperated with his tantrums and sulks as his mommy-surrogate sidekick.
But Erez Shek and Laura Coleman never allow Ted and Linda to lapse into seriousness, nor do Sloan Grenz and Lanisa Frederick, playing an assortment of period and regional types. In the Bailiwick Studio's intimate confines, they generate sparkle sufficient to render endearing even facile slapstick—our hero hopping about the bathroom with his pants around his ankles, for example—and ticklishly funny such flashpaper quips as the born-again het announcing, 'I thought I'd run for governor of New Jersey'.
