Review: Sylvia by Austin Playhouse
by Michael Meigs
On first impression, A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, now playing at the Austin Playhouse, comes across as brainless, harmless fun, mostly thanks to the gleeful, energetic actress Andrea Osborne, portraying Sylvia, the stray dog found in a New York City park.
Sylvia’s playful, adoring behavior completely captivates Greg (David Stahl), the middle-aged empty-nester who has relocated from the suburbs to the city, where he and his brainy wife Kate have found new jobs and a new life.
Greg takes the doggy home and obsesses over her, creating disorder and confusion in the couple’s new urban lifestyle. The piece becomes an extended farce over the unexpected ménage à trois. Greg cannot abandon either of the ladies – and in addition to being of different species, they appear to be creatures from different planets. Kate is a tidy, calm intellectual concentrating on the impossible challenge of teaching Shakespeare to urban middle schoolers; Sylvia is messy, sloppy, impetuous and fixated on Greg.
Add to that the fact that Sylvia talks.
To Greg, certainly; but also to Kate. Neither is surprised by this state of the world, even though Sylvia never speaks to the other three characters who drop in on the action. And since a dog’s view of the world is so profoundly different from that of a schoolteacher, there are some pretty zany conversations to follow.
That’s the joke that Gurney mines throughout the play.
There are basically two types of talking-dog jokes. The first one runs something like this:
A man and his dog walk into a bar. The man proclaims, "I'll bet you a round of drinks that my dog can talk."
Bartender: "Yeah! Sure...go ahead."
Man: "What covers a house?"
Dog: "Roof!"
Man: "How does sandpaper feel?"
Dog: "Rough!"
Man: "Who was the greatest ball player of all time?"
Dog: "Ruth!"
Man: "Pay up. I told you he could talk."
The bartender, annoyed at this point, throws both of them out of the bar.
Sitting on the sidewalk, the dog looks at the guy and says, "Or was it maybe Dimaggio?"
Ha, ha, right? So the dog really can talk.
That twist is good for a punch line and a guffaw, but it won’t sustain a whole play. The entertainment here is, instead, in the qurks of doggy behavior as enacted by a real, live woman, and in the edgy enmity between dog and wife.
Like any dog, Sylvia has few inhibitions. She climbs all over Greg and the new furniture, much to Kate’s distaste. Sylvia pulls him pell-mell through the park, winding the leash around him. Her barking at squirrels in the park surprises us because in words it’s boastful, insulting and obscene. Sylvia humps the leg of a genteel woman socialite visiting Kate, not once but twice (I had to verify that – and in fact, yes, female dogs have been known to exhibit humping behavior). At first Sylvia cowers away from other dogs in the park and later she runs free with them. Later still, in heat, she swaggers, curses and cajoles that hunk Bowser in as foul-mouthed a fashion as any sailor. 
Act I ends when a fed-up Kate confronts doggy Sylvia, who is lolling on the sofa. Kate bares her own fangs for a face-off. Greg steps in from the hall and misreads the situation. “Well, aren’t we all having a good time!”
David Stahl gives us Greg as a pleasant, decent suburban man who will not admit that he is deeply disturbed by the changes in his life. He has some kind of job in a trading house but he has begun to quarrel with his boss and to duck out to the park in the afternoons. He resists moving from commodity markets to currency markets, because he senses that he’s getting further and further removed from the real world. In conversations with a brusque young dog owner in the park and later with a transgender psychiatrist, he essentially admits that he is fixated on the dog, to the exclusion of everything else in his life. He transfers his affection for his departed children to imagined future puppies of Sylvia.
Greg’s perplexity when explaining either female to the other is manifest. His situation is, in fact, profoundly un-funny.
Kate finally forces the issue by winning a six-month study grant to England, and she challenges Greg to choose between the two females in his life. He smiles, speaks thoughtfully and well, and admits his contradictions. Forced to choose, Greg eventually does so, in a lengthy scene of contrition and frustration, stirring incomprehension in both of his loves.
The second type of talking-dog joke goes something like this:
This guy sees a sign in front of a house: "Talking Dog for Sale."
He rings the bell and the owner tells him the dog is in the backyard.
The guy goes into the backyard and sees a black mutt just sitting there.
"You talk?" he asks.
"Yep," the mutt replies.
"So, what's your story?"
The mutt looks up and says, "Well, I discovered this gift pretty young and I wanted to help the government, so I told the CIA about my gift, and in no time they had me jetting from country to country. I was one of their most valuable spies eight years running. That really tired me out. I knew I wasn't getting any younger and I wanted to settle down.
"So I signed up for a job at the airport to do some undercover security work, listening to suspicious characters. I uncovered some incredible dealings there and was awarded a batch of medals. Had a wife, a mess of puppies, and now I'm just retired."
The guy is amazed. He goes back in and asks the owner what he wants for the dog.
The owner says, "Ten dollars."
The guy says, "This dog is amazing. Why on earth are you selling him so cheaply?"
The owner replies, "He's such a liar. He didn't do any of that stuff."
After setting up that impasse, Gurney funks it. He ends the action and brings two of his characters onstage to speak directly to the audience. Their pair of whimsical, regretful little speeches dissolve the premises of the dilemma and essentially remove the enchantment that allowed Sylvia to talk. This is waving a magic wand at the last moment to assure us that despite his deep spiritual disturbance, Greg was able to heal himself, and at very little cost or sacrifice.
The four actors in the piece are talented and plausible. Especially Hans Venable, who adds real zip to the three secondary characters – male, female and indeterminate. He was substituting November 28-30 for Zach Thompson and set a high comic hurdle for Zach.
So we wonder: could Sylvia really talk? Were we, perhaps, trapped in Greg’s delusion – in which he was imagining that his wife Kate could converse equally fluently with the dog? Was Kate uncaring or simply alien to Greg’s crisis? And what, in retrospect, should we make of doggy Sylvia’s endless avowals of devotion to Greg, calling him “a god. . . “ whom she would “love forever”?
Hannah Kenah's review with special praise for Bernadette Nason, in the Austin Chronicle of November 28
Review on Austinist.com by chicksarentfunny, November 26
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Sylvia
by A.R. Gurney
Austin Playhouse