10/26/12 @ the Beck Center for the Arts
Reviewed by Laura Kennelly
Straight or gay, life isn’t simple. Douglas Carter Beane’s smart and witty farce about coming out or not, benefits from director Scott Plate’s deft touch and quick pacing. Sexual attraction plays an important role, but despite the play’s frank acceptance of nudity (all male–for a welcome change), the staging seems almost chaste, conveying the idea that bodies are important–of course–but that real love goes beyond lust.
Only one character lives up to that ideal: Alex, the young gay hustler played with charm and intensity by Brandyn Leo Lynn Day. Phil Carroll plays Mitchell, an actor overcome by a desire for fame, a desire that ultimately forces him to choose between an open, meaningful lifestyle and one filled with concealment. Given that public figures, gay or not, often face such choices, he becomes an Everyman figure. Ellen (played by a charming Lindsey Augusta Mercer) relates all too easily to both men. (It would be fascinating to see a sequel about what happens next to Ellen.)
But it’s Laura Perrotta as Mitchell’s agent Diane who injects fire and power into this story. Spotlighted from different areas of the theatre (including a front row seat) she pounces around the story like a fury–urging the vapid Mitchell toward actions to fulfill his dream, thinking through how she’d like her puppets (the rest of the cast) to act. The strongest dramatic action in the play hinges on choices made after she sets a solution to the dilemma they have created.
It’s good theatre, a story well-told. Indirectly it also reveals the ugly side of straight privilege (to borrow a term more often used to talk about other forms of discrimination), but like all good farce (which it is), it never lectures.
[Photo credit: Eric Skarl]
Final performances at the Beck Center are this weekend at 8 p.m. Friday and 3 p.m. Sunday. For tickets and information go to http://www.beckcenter.org
Laura Kennelly is a freelance arts journalist, a member of the Music Critics Association of North America, and an associate editor of BACH, a scholarly journal devoted to J. S. Bach and his circle.Listening to and learning more about music has been a life-long passion. She knows there’s no better place to do that than the Cleveland area.