Perversely, but justly, “The Play About the Naked Guy” doesn’t actually feature a naked guy, or girl, in the end. This rollicking farce by David Bell takes art versus commerce as its prime subject, but the energy of the play is too happy and uncomplicated for the satire to have any sting. In the first scene, we see a theater troupe called The Integrity Players putting on a “neglected” classic in rhyming verse. Unsurprisingly, the company is in financial straits due to their unpopular, dense offerings, and wheels are set in motion so that sell-out gay director Eddie Rossini (Christopher Borg) takes over the Integrity’s theater space to put on a lucrative nudie project starring a rough-edged porn star (Dan Amboyer). This tawdry premise is continually lightened by the quicksilver talents of the cast, all of whom sell every one-liner Bell has written, from a dig at Patti Lupone to more obscure in-jokes, with demented, inventive bits of business.
Everyone in this cast, under the excellent direction of Tom Wojtunik, deserves kudos for their unbridled energy, especially Borg and Ellen Reilly, who plays a huffy matron. These two have to barrel through some pretty questionable speeches to keep the plot moving, and they do it with great style. It’s a pleasure to hear the actor’s vocal inventiveness: Reilly lingers over her words then cuts them to ribbons, and Borg rivals her in sass and speed. As the company Serious Thespian, Wayne Henry uses a very broad, pretentious vocal delivery that gets funnier as he continues to exaggerate it, and, as two stereotypically flaming queens, Christopher Sloan and Chad Austin go all-out in a big, physical way that never gets tired. There’s a disparaging reference to “Will and Grace” at one point, but “The Play About the Naked Guy” often suggests a particularly sharp episode of that show, filled with gleefully mean remarks about pop culture and uninhibited clowning. It’s a lot of fun, really, but it might cut a little deeper if the characters were slightly more realistic, their struggles less cartoonish.
