Theatre in Review: On a Stool at the End of the Bar (The Directors Company/59E59) The first few minutes of Robert Callely's new play are purposely devoted to depicting the most banal picture of domestic life imaginable. We are in the kitchen of Tony DeMarco and his second wife, Christine, in Camden County, New Jersey in the late 1980s. It's early morning; Christine is sipping coffee; teenager Joey is cramming for a Spanish exam; little brother Mario tries to borrow money from middle child Angie. Tony decides to take the kids to McDonald's for breakfast. If you go to the theatre much, you know that this family is in big trouble--such normality will never be allowed to stand--and when the bombshell comes, it's a lulu. Chris' long-estranged brother appears, bearing a check representing her share of her recently deceased father's estate. The check is made out to Christopher--because Christine was born a man. This is news to Tony, and it would be putting it mildly to say that he takes it badly. He promptly rips Chris' blouse open and manhandles her breasts, gives her the back of his hand, then flees, taking the kids with him. It is only the first of many hysterical confrontations that will make up the action of On a Stool at the End of the Bar. Rather than explore this situation, Callely exploits it for melodrama in one scene after another. Tony calls Chris every awful name in the book; he also nearly rapes her. More than anything, he's worried that people will think he is gay. (He admits to a couple of drunken encounters in the military, but still.) The owner of a lumberyard, he moans, "Who the hell's going to buy lumber from a homo--which I ain't--but who's gonna believe it?" In the most risible scene, he consults his clueless parish priest; the latter, gobsmacked, decides that Tony must be gay, then hatches a plan to warn the entire community that a transsexual is lurking in their midst, as if Chris were the head of a terrorist cell. Joey, who may or may not have a thing for his stepmother, undergoes a major freakout after learning about her, his gay panic mirroring his father's. He accuses Tony of being a closet case and runs off to make a stunningly rash decision that, surprisingly, nobody seems interested in, or capable of, countermanding. Meanwhile, Callely would have you believe that Chris, who ran away from home at 18 and tricked in cars with johns to pay for her sex reassignment surgery, somehow morphed into a Jersey Carol Brady without retaining any emotional scars. Even in this extreme situation, she displays no rage or terror; except for one or two brief moments of anger, she mostly stands around, meekly begging for understanding. During the rare quiet moments of On a Stool at the End of the Bar--the title refers to how Chris and Tony met in a Philadelphia club--you can ask yourself, Did Tony never notice that his still-young wife of many years never needed any feminine sanitary products or birth control? Did Chris really believe that the truth about her past would never come out? Was it really necessary to signal that Chris' brother is a political conservative by making him wear an enormous Bush/Quayle button? (The brother has a gay son, which is the play's karmic retribution for his youthful mistreatment of Chris.) Given such a contrived situation and dialogue that mostly consists of insults and wild accusations, there is little that the cast, under the direction of Michael Parva, can do. Still, Antoinette Thornes is a warm and likable presence as Chris, and Timothy John Smith manages to find some humanity in Tony, occasionally suggesting the confusion and hurt inside his fury. Within the limits of their roles, Zachary Brod, Sara Kapner, and Luke Slattery are refreshingly natural as the DeMarco kids. Robert Hogan, a good actor, is hamstrung by bad writing as that fatheaded priest. As Chris' sometime therapist, Liza Vann at least gets to make the point that Chris might be, in part, the author of her own troubles for deceiving her loved ones so badly. Otherwise, the notion that there might be more than one side to this story is strikingly absent. Jessica L. Parks' set is a solid rendering of a working-class Jersey kitchen, with additional playing areas for scenes outside the house. Amy C. Bradshaw's costumes are fairly representative of the play's location and time frame. Jill Nagle's lighting and Quentin Chiappetta's sound design (and original music, which has an '80s-era pop sound) are both fine. In the final scene, Callely seems to maneuver the DeMarcos into something that resembles a return to their normal existence, although how that is supposed to work is anyone's guess. As resolutions go, it is as synthetic as everything else in On a Stool at the End of the Bar.--David Barbour 
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