Live! Nude! Boys! Wake Up in Intiman Theatre
It's a hilarious, biting, Wilde-in-Williamsburg social comedy, but Intiman's production of The Little Dog Laughed (through September 13, tickets $10-$48) is also recommended for those 18 and over. That is, adults who won't flinch at a swinging dick or two on stage, or the frankly profane language of these modern times.
Until this moment, Douglas Carter Beane's off-Broadway-then-on-Broadway, poison-pen skewering of the capacious Hollywood closet was more likely to play at ACT than the more classics-minded, genteel Intiman. (In fact, director Fracaswell Hyman's last Intiman outing was To Kill a Mockingbird.) It turns out last season's Prayer for My Enemy was not a one-off experiment with a play whose characters know what a cell phone is.
For all its gay grab-ass, Beane's play kicks over the traces of played-out coming-out drama; it's about the choice to be the real you when society has another role for you in mind. Here, as in life, society is Hollywood's film industry.
As movie-star Mitchell, Neal Bledsoe is completely charming drunk or sober, and just wants to be held. (All the boys in the audience sigh.) His fling with rentboy Alex (Quinlan Corbett), the hustler with a heart of gold, blossoms into a Big Gay Love Affair, while his monomaniac agent Diane (Christa Scott-Reed) tries to keep his eyes on the Tinseltown prize. Oh, and Ellen (Megan Hill) is Alex's kinda-sorta girlfriend.
All of them have dreams of breaking out, but all of them secretly wonder if the weather's nicer inside. Beane's idea is to let them dream, then see how hard they hang on to it.
On opening night, the first act was sketchy, and then the afterburners hit after intermission. Too often the actors declaimed (partly due to playwright Beane, partly because director Hyman let them) when they should have been establishing character. That's excepting Bledsoe, who was on--pardon the expression--fire from start to finish. Scott-Reed hit her stride later on, and with a Parker Posey vengeance.
Corbett and Hill have the most trouble with their roles; Corbett has to keep a number of contradictory balls in the air: hustler, sweet kid, sexually confused damaged goods. Hill's Ellen suffers from the same hodge-podgery: she's a wise-cracking hustler herself--and soft-hearted, naive, and needy. The steps these two take, and then take back, aren't as meaningful and heartfelt in contrast.
Like Oscar Wilde, Beane is fond of a well-formed witticism that requires a healthy helping of panache to carry off. But as written, a friend of ours said, the characters are just interesting enough that you become dissatisfied with their meandering motivations. And the play betrays its off-Broadway roots with irrelevant excursions to Westchester (and quips about "non-Colonial Williamsburg"), while advertising the Broadway rewrite with scene-chewing arias that get big, big, big!
Most notably, the play relies purely on its audience's imagination to generate the conflict with "society"--which isn't present on stage except for a few seconds in the form of troubling press clippings. Otherwise, conflict comes in the form of Diane, who's like Mitchell's Machiavellian stage mom, and that's not the same thing.
“A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal,” pointed out Oscar Wilde. Beane would like to have his droll wit and dole out sincerity, too, reminding us of these chocolate and beet cupcakes we once ate. We really liked the chocolate part.
Photos: (top) Quinlan Corbett as Alex and Neal Bledsoe as Mitchell; (right) Christa Scott-Reed as Diane and Neal Bledsoe as Mitchell. © Chris Bennion.
