Theatre in Review: A Funny Thing Happened.... (MCC Theater/Lucille Lortel Theatre)

	Beth Behrs, Lisa Emery. Photo: Matthew Murphy.

The playwright Halley Feiffer operates under a strict policy: No prisoners will be taken. Even her titles can scald: How to Make Friends and Kill Them was a sadistic, skin-crawling exercise in mean-girl tactics. I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard, about a fragile young actress and her cruelly manipulative, has-been playwright father, all but dared the audience to ask if they weren't seeing a hatchet job on the author's parent, Jules Feiffer. So it stands to reason that when she decided to write a romantic comedy, it would be A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center of New York City. With such a showboating title, a playwright had better be able to deliver the admixture of laughs and drama that it seems to promise. Fortunately, Feiffer is both talented and fearless in pursuing her own particular vision.

She begins riding our nerves the minute we enter the theatre to find Lauren Helpern's photo-realistically detailed hospital-room set, each of its two beds occupied by an unconscious middle-aged woman. The action begins with the twentysomething Karla sitting with her mother and trying out a series of jokes about vibrators and rape. There is a perfectly good reason for this: Karla is a standup comedian and is working on a new routine -- but Don, who is sitting on the other side of the room's divider curtain, doesn't know that. A line like "I don't think there's anything funnier than rape" is just about the last thing he expects to hear under the circumstances.

Don makes his objections known and the situation quickly accelerates into DEFCON red status. Karla defensively asserts, "I am focusing on my Mom. And she fucking likes vibrator jokes!" "Yeah," replies Don, savagely. "Seems like they're really killing over there." Zeroing in on Don's slovenly appearance, she announces, "Those sweat pants are a hate crime!" Soon they are hurling Dixie cups of water in each other's faces and those sweat pants are pulled down, revealing a pair of Tweety-Bird-themed undershorts. Don, flustered and furious, says, "When your mother's been dying for seven years, you sort of stop noticing what kind of boxers you're wearing, okay?" "That still doesn't explain the sweat pants," replies Karla.

Well, the course of true love never did run smooth. After the hostilities give way to a cease-fire-and given the fact that they are doomed to see each other for the foreseeable future -- Karla and Don get to know each other, sharing their extensive sets of emotional baggage. The product of a broken home -- she never really knew her father, and her sister died of a drug overdose -- Karla grew up trying to keep her depressed mother entertained. And, for all her attitude, she has yet to achieve an adult relationship. Despite looking like a homeless person, as Karla acidly notes, Don is wealthy, having cashed out of the Internet business that he developed. It's one of life's little ironies that the business was called PerfectWeddingMatches.com, since his wife has left him for another woman and his adolescent son no longer speaks to him. The boy does hack into his father's bank account, however, leaving taunting text messages after the fact.

In Feiffer's cockeyed view, these two eminently damaged souls are pretty much perfect for each other, if only because of their emotional scars and their shared experiences with gravely ill mothers. The author is a master at switching between a killer laugh line and a moment of exquisite pain, often in a matter of seconds. One reason Karla and Don spar so enthusiastically is that in their lives humor is in short supply. That's not a charge anyone is likely to level at A Funny Thing.... When they finally get together, it's for a farcical act of oral sex, with Karla perched on the bathroom sink, her moans of pleasure interrupted by a recital of her long, long list of emotional issues, while Don tries to keep her on track.

Lest you think A Funny Thing... is only about Karla and Don, the great Lisa Emery plays Marcie, Karla's mother, who, from the minute she awakens -- asking, "Who do I have to fuck around here to get a fizzy water?" -- makes clear that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree. (Jacqueline Sydney, as Don's mother, Geena, spends most of the play knocked out, but when she speaks, she makes every word count, hilariously.) The ruthlessly unsentimental Marcie is uniquely capable of cowing Karla; a social worker, she reserves every bit of sympathy for her clients. Still, Don haltingly reaches out to her, too, and, eventually, a little family begins to form.

If the later scenes of A Funny Thing... seem a little pro forma, even sitcom-ish, it's partly because Feiffer's skill at writing scenes of tentative reconciliation isn't as distinctive as her knack for invective and shock tactics, and also because one can legitimately wonder what the chances are that Karla and Don -- who are separated by age, fiscal status, career achievement, and sensibility -- will ever make it together. Still, under Trip Cullman's nimble direction, the actors traverse the high-wire script with remarkable agility. Beth Behrs, a veteran of the CBS series 2 Broke Girls, certainly knows her way around a laugh line; she also expertly highlights both Karla's gamine qualities and her steel-trap mind. As Don, Erik Lochtefeld easily convinces us that he is both a millionaire and a loser; he matures believably as he begins to entertain the idea of himself and Karla as a couple. Emery never disappoints, and her stunningly tough-minded Marcie is no exception. In her scenes with Behrs, we get a full picture of their lifelong fractious mother-daughter bond.

In addition to Helpern's set, which is accurate down to the tiniest detail, Matthew Richards' lighting creates a variety of time-of-day looks, including a final lovely burst of sunlight. Kaye Voyce's costumes capture Karla and Don's essential quirkiness; when he makes a late appearance in an attractive suit, his transformation reveals volumes. Darron L West's sound design mixes ambient hospital sounds with guitar music, pieces of Sufjan Stevens' "One Black Shroud," and bits of Law & Order, which is Marcie's secret vice.

With A Funny Thing..., Feiffer maintains her reputation as one of the nerviest young playwrights around. Her handling of a potentially exploitative premise avoids both coarseness and sentimentality; there's something terribly true about the way comedy and tragedy keep bumping up against each other. "You do not understand my charming and irreverent dark sense of humor at all," snaps Karla at one point. Based on the laughter emanating from the Lucille Lortel at the performance I attended, I think we are totally on her wavelength. -- David Barbour