Romantic comedy is pretty much a dead issue in movies, but the genre is alive and well on stage.
Saturday afternoon I saw Adam Bock’s “The Drunken City” at Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan and felt the thrill of discovering a fresh approach to love and laughs in this crazy new century we are in.
The play ended a limited run at the non-profit theater on Sunday, but I would be shocked if something this sharp and this funny didn’t get picked up by a commercial producer for an open-ended run off-Broadway. Bock has created something that should have special appeal to that elusive under-35 demographic live theater has been losing to other media.
Powered by a terrific six-actor ensemble, “The Drunken City” is a 90-minute, intermission-less piece that takes us deeper into “real life” than many plays that are twice as long.
Bock never really answers the main question he poses — What is this thing called “love”? — but he makes every step of his confused characters’ journeys interesting and all of the laughs grow out of shocks of recognition.
What a kick it is to see a play where it is impossible to tell from moment to moment what might happen next and yet everything that does happen rings true.
Bock takes a simple situation — three suburban girls barhopping in the big city — and opens it up into a hilarious and surprisingly profound examination of the search for love.
The just-engaged Marnie (Cassie Beck) thinks she has won a prize in the form of her off-stage fiance and her girlfriends Melissa (Maria Dizzia) and Linda (Sue Jean Kim) are fully vested in that belief because they have both become engaged recently, too.
The girls bump into two handsome, unattached guys — Eddie (Barrett Foa) and Frank (Mike Colter). When Marnie agrees to kiss Frank, the ground underneath all of the characters shakes — literally — thanks to David Korins’ simple but unexpectedly mobile urban sidewalk set.
Marnie and Frank go missing and Melissa and Linda fear the worst, calling their friend Bob (Alfredo Narciso) to come into the city and join in the hunt. Bob happens to be one of the least stereotypical gay men ever seen on a New York stage — a baker who is tired of being walked-out on by his boyfriends — and what happens between him and dentist Eddie is as surprising and funny as what happens to the three girls.
In his remarkably direct program notes, Bock states, “There’s a dramatic truism that when a character is drunk he or she will be the truth-teller, so I thought, ‘Hey, why not write a play where everyone is drunk — that way truth’ll be flying around everywhich everywhere.’ And then I thought, ‘Plus, it’ll be funny because drunk girls are funny and I’m gonna write about some girls in the city.’ But mostly I thought, ‘If everyone is drunk, and the world is drunk, who knows what’ll happen and that’s usually a good start.’”
“…I keep hoping to learn how to tell the truth. That’s why I write plays. There are those beautiful moments, when we are all together, because some voice has talked to us all, and we have all heard it — ‘I hear that,’ I whisper; ‘So do I,’ says another — and suddenly we are all together. Feels very worthwhile to search for these moments.”
“The Drunken City” is packed with those “beautiful moments” when we are in the presence of a playwright who is, indeed, telling us the truth.
