Quickie review:
Stellar acting all around deserves high praise, while the tired, clichéd script deserves the wood-chipper treatment. Go if you have never seen a gay-themed play before and want to see talented actors make the most out a lame script. Do not go if you have seen a gay-themed play -- any gay-themed play -- in the past 30 years, since there’s nothing new here.
Long review:
Two words make this play watchable: Joe Egender. Rarely have I seen an actor bring so much natural warmth, vulnerability, and humanity to a character. He effortlessly makes the implausibility of his character’s actions believable and sympathetic. Egender is worth his weight in gold to this production. And then some. Sarah Foret makes the most of her age-inappropriate dialogue (and I’m not talking about her F-word spree), delivering a truly wonderful performance throughout. The brilliant Brian Unger manages to generate laughs where none should otherwise be. This is to his great credit, since his lamely written lines violate truth-of-scene (and reality) right and left. The rest of the cast performed admirably, and none stood out as wanting.
The sound design by Cricket S. Myers was incredible. By far, it was the best tech aspect of the show, and, thankfully, the good sound system in the theater did it justice. Sadly detracting was the theater itself: a poorly insulated shell of a building that let in every sound from fighting cats in a nearby alley to general traffic on Santa Monica Blvd.
Less successful, in my opinion, was Jeff McLaughlin's set design. I'm all for minimalist sets, but for some reason, this one rubbed me the wrong way. Built in a staggered, step-pyramid style with uneven ‘blocks’ of varying heights, depths, and widths, it created an awkwardness with the blocking. Because the steps were steep, actors could not effortlessly move up and down them. In fact, an actor even stumbled coming down one of the tall steps near the top of the play that made the audience gasp. We were a little nervous for the rest of the night that another actor or set changer would fall.
Tom Ontiveros’ projection design was sort of hit-and-miss in my opinion. Appropriately, his images that were projected onto the upstage wall were merely suggestive or evocative of their content, matching the approach of the set design. However, perhaps due to the width of the set, two projectors were used, each projecting the same image on opposite sides of the wall but with one flipped horizontally so that it was a mirror of the other. The projections, therefore, drew attention to themselves, which may not have been intended. I did like Ontiveros’ sequence in the overpass scene; his work really shined there.
Paul Ruddy’s casting was simply SUPERB! Absolutely perfect actors for the roles without exception.
I loved, loved, loved Neil H. Weiss’ direction. He took an inordinate amount of material and mined gold out of nearly every moment. There could have been a lot of hand-wringing, maudlin moments that he expertly avoided. I especially enjoyed his direction of Egender and Foret. One sequence, though, did bug the hell out of me. It’s the one where Weiss has an actor completely and utterly copy Christian Bale’s performance (down to exact gestures and expressions) from one of the sex scenes in American Psycho. While this happens to be the funniest scene in He Asked for It, it is still a total rip-off. The treadmill shtick in the very first scene of the play also didn’t work for me. Yeah, yeah: we know we’re in for a minimalist set when we’re taking our seats and looking right at it. But even then, an audience needs a chance to buy into the idea set pieces and props are going to be suggestive of their respective real things. Give us a scene or two to get used to it before starting the play with actors jogging in place as if they are on a treadmill -- especially if they’re not doing it convincingly. In fact, the scene came across as hokey and amateurish; it was like watching bad spacework improv. Later in the show, however, the second treadmill scene knocked it out of the park. What a difference being onboard made.
And now I get to the writing, which, for me, was the low-point of He Asked for It. Not only has Erik Patterson regurgitated the same, tired, clichéd ‘gay theater’ themes, he crams them all into one play. Plenty of hot guys in their underwear? Check. Tragic gay hero? Check. Struggling with coming out? Check. Grousing about HIV? Check. Dealing with hateful family members tempered with a plucky supportive one? Check and double check. The only thing missing was a bible-pounding loudmouth who eventually learns to accept gay people after being gingerly led down the path towards tolerance Afternoon Special-style.
No gay theme Patterson revisits has a new take or approach. Worse, though, Patterson takes his already dated material and dates it even more! The play centers around online dating on AOL. AOL? Seriously? What decade is he living in? I guess he could have gone for the gold and chosen Prodigy or CompuServe. And then there is a pseudo-funny, long-running analogy involving television being the career-death of film actors (I won’t give away the full context of the riff). The problem with it, though, is that it is entirely untrue nowadays. Film actors now cross over into television all the time. From D-list schlubs to A-list superstars. The play completely ignores this fact for the sake of the joke -- this dated, no-longer-relevant joke -- and it insults our intelligence and wastes our time. (Sure, Patterson has a character acknowledge this fatal flaw, saying “Some people tell me this isn’t true anymore, but I don’t believe them!” But that’s just an excuse to get the joke in, a joke Patterson probably worked on for years back when it was true and now just can’t let go.)
Which leads me to the worst of Patterson’s indulgences: the play’s length. He Asked for It is in desperate need of trimming. Having shoehorned three plays’ worth of actors and storylines into one, he has created a bloated mess. Entire characters can and should be cut from this play. And what makes the long scenes even longer is Patterson’s tendency to have many character’s philosophize with the same voice. Sure, some characters have their own quirks, but Act II is full of speechifying by characters using pretty much the same diction and eloquence. I felt like I was watching an episode of Dawson’s Creek with its absurdly sophisticated introspection by characters who should lack it. And it was boring in its seeming repetitiveness.
Overall, a quality production, saved mostly by Joe Egender and the rest of the cast.
