Theatre in Review: Fulfillment (The Flea Theater)Thomas Bradshaw's career as a playwright has depended so much on shock value that one might be forgiven for thinking that "provocateur" is his first name. Still, it's surprising to see how, well, sedate his work is getting. I'm thinking of his new work, Fulfillment, even though it is, to my knowledge, the first production I've seen that comes with a "sex choreographer." His name is Yehuda Duenyas, and believe me, he's worth every penny. So much of Fulfillment takes place in bed that the cast would definitely be at a loss without him. There are scenes of spanking, masturbation, various forms of intercourse; a couple pauses during their lovemaking and the man casually pulls off a condom and throws it away. The most novel aspect of all this is that the couplings are entirely heterosexual. This, I believe, is a Bradshaw innovation. Indeed, there's nothing here to match the notorious ejaculation scene in Intimacy, Bradshaw's previous offering, or the three-way between two middle-aged men and a 13-year-old boy, seen in Burning, the play before that. You could almost call Fulfillment a vanilla play. In any case, it may be time for the author to face up to the diminishing returns that such tactics are yielding. As I learned from a checkered adolescence spent sneaking into X-rated films, one graphic act can be a shocker, even a turn-on. Half a dozen is like attending a Broadway musical with one original number and 15 encores. No song is that good. Not that a lot doesn't happen in Fulfillment, which is, essentially, about a man who ruins his life by purchasing an overpriced condo. Michael is an associate at a top Manhattan law firm, but, even so, he is nervous about having to cough up a million and a half for the apartment of his dreams. (We see him on the phone, genially chiseling eighty thousand out of his mother.) He confides his fears to Sarah, a colleague, who points out that Michael has bigger problems than he realizes: He is black, pushing 40, and still not a partner -- and he is being used by a racist management that trots him out whenever a little diversity is needed. "You should be living in a five-million-dollar apartment," Sarah tells him. Michael complains to management and is told that when he gets off the bottle he will be considered for promotion. Since we've seen Michael staggering around, swilling Bombay Sapphire straight from the bottle, and since he sometimes wets the bed and wakes up vomiting, his boss has a point. By now, Michael is dating Sarah, by which I mean he spanks her in the stairwell of her building as a prelude to oral sex. Sarah, who clearly sees him as a fixer-upper, takes him to "the quasi-religious group" to which she belongs. "We chant and stuff," she says. At first, this plan seems to work, and Michael finally finds himself on the partner track. But then there's Ted, his upstairs neighbor, a stay-at-home dad and black cloud of free-floating hostility. Upon meeting Michael, he accuses him of farting in their building's hallway. Soon, he is making noise at all times of day and night, methodically driving Michael mad. Despite Sarah's insistence that he adopt an attitude of Buddhistic detachment, he starts to crack under the pressure of constant noise and no sleep. His work and sexual performance both suffer. There are many moments when Fulfillment resembles such dark 1970s comedies of life in the New York jungle as Jules Feiffer's Little Murders or even Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue -- minus the laughs. In any case, his resistance worn down to nothing, Michael finds himself on the road to hell, thanks to a combination of malign fate and terrible personal choices. There will be terrible accidents, violent beatings, and a ham-handed career power play that ends in disaster. And, as so often is the case in a Bradshaw play, none of it seems to matter. The playwright makes no secret of his disdain for the niceties of conventional drama, but he has little to offer in place of them. His plays are basically adult comic books. The plots are jerry-rigged, the characters are flat. They always say exactly what they mean; there is no such thing as subtext. (You can practically see the balloons over their heads when they speak.) There are plentiful references to hot-button topics (racism, miscarriage, pedophilia), and of course all those sexual encounters. Strikingly absent are wit, irony, or a sense of how the real world works. Fulfillment has a much tauter dramatic structure than his other recent works, and you can have an interesting discussion on the topic of Sarah, whose every effort at fixing Michael leads him further into trouble; this issue becomes especially pertinent when, late in the play, she shows real skill at blackmailing clients and advancing her own career. Ethan McSweeny's sleek production maintains a crackling pace, with a few furniture pieces being whirled around the set to edgy, percussive jazz supplied by the sound designer, Miles Polaski, who also cleverly worked up a battery of Foley effects practiced by Ted to antagonize Michael. (During these scenes, we see Jeff Biehl, who plays Ted, in a loft at stage left, furiously practicing his noisemaking techniques.) There's a lot to like in Brian Sidney Bembridge's set, with its oddly angled ceiling and slanting bookcases, as well as his clean, confident lighting. Andrea Lauer's costumes are perfectly calibrated to each character. As Michael, Gbenga Akinnagbe shows considerable charm and presence; if he can't quite make a coherent character out of Michael, it's probably because he hasn't been asked to do so. He is nicely matched with the Sarah of Susannah Flood, who uses a piercing nasal voice and solid comic technique to convey her gimlet-eyed view of the world as well as her barely banked sexual fires. They share a real chemistry and acquit themselves with elan during their lengthy bedroom workouts. Biehl is a genuine comic nightmare as Ted, a human hurricane of righteous fury. Otoja Abit is also impressive as an NBA star who opts for an ill-advised night on the town with Michael. Denny Dillon turns in a trio of sharp comic cameos, as an all-business real-estate agent, an eerily accommodating waitress, and the butch president of Michael's condo, who is practiced in the art of intimidation. But Fulfillment is most notable for showing the author's commando tactics and singular style wearing perilously thin. Everything that an audience might find offensive in this work is something he has done before, but with more brio. The day may come when he will have to drop graphic sex and vulgar references altogether -- now that would be a shock. -- David Barbour 
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