Review: The Little Dog Laughed by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
City Theatre Artistic Director Andy Berkovsky had wanted to do Douglas Carter Beane's four-character sex farce since at least mid-2009. The title floated out there on the City's season listings, pending availability of performance rights. When City finally got the rights and ran it for four weeks in June and July, the silence was deafening. Not a single review appeared.
The City has faced controversy with equanimity -- a year ago, Paul Ruddick's gay-themed comedy The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told played in this same slot in the season and drew demonstrators and on-line comment (a new one from Oklahoma City just showed up today on the ALT blog). But silence?
Ruddick's play was a gay spoof of the Bible; Beane's play is a gay spoof of Hollywood, with the thesis that A-List Hollywood actors are obliged to cover up homosexual or bisexual identities because they fear becoming damaged goods at the box office. Perhaps there was no one willing to go to bat for Tinsel Town.
Ruddick's play was pretty silly stuff, done with the exuberance of consciously naughty adolescents. Beane's play is something more. He does launch lots of raucous cheap shots at Hollywood hypocrisy, incarnated in the character of narrator and showbiz agent Diane, played by Michelle Cheney. Beane's career as a screenwriter suggests strongly that in this 2006 play he knew what he was talking about. The core of the play, however, is the struggle between commercialized lust and affection.
Each of these characters is a whore. Diane the lesbian agent is willing to do anything at all to land a big deal and get rich; Mitch the bumbling male movie star struggles with his homosexual desires while selling his actor persona in hopes of a really big movie break. Alex, 24 years old and living in New York City, is straight but earns his living through a homosexual call service; Ellen, Alex's friend since high school, shacks up with older men who pay her for companionship and sometimes for sex.
Stated as bluntly as that, it all sounds pretty bleak -- an impression reinforced by Aleks Ortynski's edgy black-and-white photographs of the protagonists. But with the exception of Diane the harridan from Hollywood, there is a lot of seeking and vulnerability portrayed.
Vic Trevino gives us actor Mitch Green as confused and not too bright, in fact a really nice guy who appears to lack the massive ego of a Hollywood star. On a promotional tour to New York to investigate a satirical play by a homosexual writer miffed with Hollywood (hello, Douglas Carter Beane), Mitch is lonely in his hotel, deep in a bottle of liquor, and calls up the gay dating service. Micah Sudduth turns up as Alex the call boy. The scene unrolls with the tentative, nerve-wracking delicacy of a blind date, never consummated. On an impulse the next morning, Alex gives his telephone number to his host -- scarcely a client, even though money exchanges hands. Diane the agent finds them and tries to take charge, wanting to protect the actor's reputation.
Three tracks are running here: the Hollywood visitors' courtship of the unseen playwright; Alex's growing attraction for actor Mitch with a physical relationship, discreetly portrayed; and a relationship of familiarity between Alex and Ellen, each disappointed by bleak, lonely years in the City. Beane manipulates these characters and their dreams, leaving only one of them deeply disappointed, but City's cast makes them real and attractive, however harsh the setting. Except, of course, for Michelle Cheney as the wicked Diane, a creature of obsessive ego with words as sharp as her stiletto heels. But we recognize Michelle's happy glee in creating the marvelously horrible Diane.
I'd seen Keeley Koop as a gutsy Celia in Chuck Ney's As You Like It at Texas State, as one of the company of brothel women in Charles Stite's staging of Early Girl at the SVT and as Shelley in City's staging of Sam Shepard's Buried Child. Koop here had a watchful physicality, exactly suited to Ellen with her situational morals and hungry heart.
The male leads were new faces -- and bodies -- for me. Trevino had impressive presence and a bodybuilder's physique, but more memorable was his candid rendition of Mitch's affability and desire to please. Micah Sudduth's psyche was the battleground of this action, and his use of subtle hesitation, body reaction and controlled expression underlined that interiority. Director Farias tells me that Trevino is a San Antonio resident; Sudduth recently relocated to Austin. I will gladly go to see either of them onstage again.
Unless you're a City Theatre regular or were alerted by word of mouth, you've missed this curious romantic tragicomedy. My friend the webmaster at TheatreAustin, Yahoo Groups, classifies his own post-closing commentaries as "useless reviews," and for a time I pondered the usefulness of writing about a piece that I attended only on its closing weekend. The Little Dog Laughed was an unexpected gift, however, a challenge to convention and a story with heart. Berkovsky, Farias and the cast delivered an evening that remained vivid in memory and implication long after I left the theatre.
Review by Michael Graupmann at www.austin.culturemap.com, July 18
EXTRA
Click to view program pages for City Theatre's The Little Dog Laughed
Hits as of 2015 03 01: 1906
The Little Dog Laughed
by Douglas Carter Beane
City Theatre Company
