Theatre in Review: Rx (Primary Stages/59E59)

	Marylouise Burke Photo: James Leynse

In Rx, Kate Fodor latches onto a subject that practically screams for satire: how the pharmaceutical industry floods the media with smiley-faced ads for drugs with unpronounceable names designed to treat diseases you've never heard of before, largely because somebody just made them up. When Fodor, who, as a journalist, studied the subject up close, takes on the transparently shameless marketing techniques of Big Pharma, she lands some solid laughs. But Rx gets distracted by matters of the heart -- It's a boy-meets-girl/girl-meets-pill story -- and loses its way. Fodor aims to marry satire and conventional romantic comedy, a match that produces a distinctly ungainly offspring.

Meena, Fodor's heroine, is a 37-year-old ex-poet -- her one published volume of prose poems sank like a stone -- who is unhappy with her job. This isn't surprising, since she toils as managing editor of Piggeries, American Cattle & Swine Magazine, a trade rag dedicated to putting the best possible face on the sins of the meatpacking industry. Talk about your lives of quiet desperation: Twice a day, she sneaks off to a nearby department store, and hides out in the mature ladies underwear section, sobbing quietly amid the bloomers. At wit's end, she enrolls in trials for a new drug being developed for "workplace depression," a newly coined syndrome allegedly caused by rapidly falling epinephrine levels while on the job. Or as Phil, the doctor running the trial, says, "It isn't a personal failing. It's a disease -- we hope."

Fodor, a gifted writer -- her last work produced in New York, 100 Saints You Should Know, was a real charmer -- has a merry time with the ugly facts behind the pill-pushing industry. She comes up with an uproarious marketing meeting, in which the drug in question is christened "Thriveon" and plans are laid to get Dolly Parton to sing a new version of "9 to 5" for the envisioned TV commercial. Whenever Elizabeth Rich is on hand as a ferocious -- and terrifyingly accurate -- executive who gets a natural high from corporate intrigue ("We pay four people to read the FDA regulations just to find out what they mean"), or when Paul Niebanck shows up as a deftly cartooned marketing executive or as one of Phil's berserk colleagues ("If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called 'research'"), Rx is good, gleeful fun.

But far too much time is spent on the on-again, off-again romance of Meena and Phil, who break all the rules by dating while she participates in his trial. Both are miserable in their jobs; he dreams of joining a Doctors Without Borders-type organization -- even though he is noticeably lacking in people skills -- and she begins to see herself somewhere in the African veldt, penning blank verse while he inoculates the natives. But when Thriveon starts to have its effect, Meena takes to her career with a vengeance, kvelling over graphs depicting pork production and all but raping her editorial director on his desk. Suddenly, she finds her job to be sexier than Phil, who takes desperate measures to get her back.

The trouble is Meena and Phil are boring, a pair of drabs with little or nothing to say for themselves. Fodor, apparently in a thrifty mood, parses out one character trait apiece, leaving Marin Hinkle and Stephen Kunkken, who play them, with almost nothing to work with. In fact, they pretty much fade into the walls of Lee Savage's set whenever Rich and Niebanck appear. They're even helpless against Marylouise Burke, hired to do her standard wacky-old-lady thing in a spurious subplot that tries, and fails, to add some emotional heft to the proceedings. If we don't care about Meena and Phil, the script has nowhere to go but down.

As a result, Rx at times induces a bad case of tedious theatre syndrome -- a sadly overlooked disease, although it affects millions -- and, in this instance, it isn't entirely relieved by regular infusions of Fodor's barbed wit.

In most other respects, Rx is a thoroughly professional enterprise, even if the director, Ethan McSweeney, has trouble forging the script's mixed moods into anything substantial. Savage's set is cleverly contrived to stand in for several offices, examining rooms, and bedrooms; whenever Meena repairs to that department store, it cues the appearance of a drop consisting entirely of voluminous Technicolor underpants. Matthew Richards' lighting and Andrea Lauer's costumes are perfectly solid. (Rich's costumes, prime examples of female corporate armor, are perfect.) Lindsay Jones' sound design is an amusing mixture of jazz riffs and elevator music, depending on the moment.

Still, the dilemma remains. Rx is a screwball comedy about drugs, and its leading characters are a pair of pills. Let's skip the romance and get back to the real subject; that's where the fun is.--David Barbour