Theatre in Review: Dinner With the Boys (Theatre Row)The new season is but days old and already we have a contender for the most indescribable offering of the year. The jaw-dropper in question is Dinner With the Boys, in which Dan Lauria, a fine character actor, turns playwright, to pen a cozy domestic comedy about those unfailing sources of laughter, the Mafia, contract murder, and cannibalism. The lights come up on Jessica Parks' nicely detailed suburban New Jersey kitchen setting, where we are introduced to Charlie and Dom, an odd-couple pair of Italian-Americans of a certain age. While they fuss over dinner, we get the lowdown on them: They are hit men, working for a mobster known as Big Anthony, Jr. Currently, they are in a kind of enforced retirement, following the murder of Leo, their colleague and best friend. (They didn't want to kill Leo -- really, they didn't -- but Big Anthony brooks no dissent.) They have a unique way of dispensing with the evidence. Leo's bones have been ground up to make fertilizer for Charlie's garden, and the rest of him has been served up as a series of entrées. Now, Big Anthony, Jr. is coming for the "last supper," in which all three men will devour Leo's brains. (This is presented as some kind of goombah ritual.) The good eating is spoiled, however, when it becomes clear that Big Anthony intends to kill them both. So they cut his throat over the sink, and, don't you know it, they set about carving his corpse into a variety of choice cuts. Are you laughing yet? I thought so. Lauria sets up Charlie and Dom as a version of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, with a side of ziti. Dom is the Felix character, who tears up easily and glows when his cooking is praised. Asking for the details of Charlie and Leo's most fabled hit job, Charlie demurs, saying he will talk about any other killing. Dom, getting weepy, says, "I know about all the other hits." By the end of Act I, we know about them, too. We are treated to stories about victims being roasted in pizza ovens, having their honey-covered faces devoured by ants, and of hearts being eaten, raw. Astonishingly, all of this is meant to be hilarious. When ISIS-level barbarity isn't being served up in this giggly fashion, Lauria has a full supply of smirking homosexual jokes. One of them produces a sample from the garden; the other one, handling it, murmurs, "You have a very hard zucchini." Later, Dom, envisioning a future menu, says, "You're gonna love what I'm gonna do with your squash." The preparation of Big Anthony's remains cues a disgusting masturbation joke, which I will spare you. Further complications unfold in Act II, but, since the program deliberately misleads the audience, I will say no more -- and, really, you've had enough. All I can add is that this is one of the most repellent plays I have encountered in many a year. Under Frank Megna's ultra-broad direction, Lauria (Charlie), Richard Zavaglia (Dom), and Ray Abruzzo (Big Anthony) mug so ferociously, you'd think they were playing in Radio City Music Hall, not the intimate Acorn Theatre. Patricia E. Doherty's costumes are fine and Matt Kraus' sound design provides a full playlist of such pop classics as "Mambo Italiano" and "If I Knew You Were Coming I'd've Baked a Cake." For some reason, every time somebody talks about the past, Jill Nagle's lighting dims, with Dom and Charlie left in a small pool of white light, with sinister music underscoring the dialogue. I can't think why anyone imagined this was a good idea. The only other point I can make is that, watching Dinner With the Boys, I thought, somebody should call the Italian-American Anti-Defamation League. Then I realized, almost everyone involved with it is Italian. Oh, well; never mind. -- David Barbour 
|
