Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

It's not every day your Playbill comes with a fish recipe, but an insert for Bass For Picasso features an excerpt right out of The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook (a major event in this work) that sounds as yummy as could possibly be-any foodie would salivate just reading it. Pity then that Theater Breaking Through Barriers' production of Kate Moira Ryan's biting, very funny satire of gay and lesbian NYC artistes and professionals is never as enticing as that recipe. Directed by Ike Schambelan with little of the nuance it would take to really put across Ryan's multilayered reflection of citified self-absorption, the production instead seems rather limp, much like the fish of its title that is served to our most unusual dinner party.

Francesca (Anita Hollander), a New York Times food writer obsessed with perfecting the title dish, lives in a stylish Tribeca loft with her IKEA-obsessed Euro-something lover Pilar (Felice Neals), who is prone to feeling the complete opposite of everyone in the room (even confessing to thinking Ronald Reagan was a great leader). They are joined by good friend Kev (Terry Small), a formerly alcoholic playwright who just hit a break at Playwrights Horizons (literally next door to this show's venue) and instead of bringing his cute young boy-toy, opts to bring along Bricka (Mary Theresa Archbold), a lesbian mom whose lover just died and is anticipating a custody battle with the deceased partner's Republican parents. And later on Joe (Nicholas Viselli) drops by, a wired doctor currently nursing the wounds of caretaking for his crystal-meth addicted lover, the latter on his way to the party but keeps taking the wrong train, ending up anywhere from Brooklyn to New Jersey with no clue where he is. Complications ensue when the guests discover secrets, have outbursts, and generally try to one-up each other all while barreling through bottles of wine and tending to the terrible twosome of children upstairs.

Ryan's 80-minute play is filled with piquant observations about the New York elite (Francesca and Pilar have a pair of spoiled, unseen sons who experiment with nipple clamps and perversions of Disney movies) and name-drops everything from Fairway to the East Village bar The Cock to give a sense of NYC flavor. The dialogue is of a Woody Allen tartness with a touch of malapropism (Pilar exclaims at one point that she just wants “to take a deep breath and breathe”) and though some of the cast succeed at putting it over, mostly the viewer watches punchlines hang in the air, just waiting to be flung out to some greater effect.

Hollander is a disabled actress with only one leg, which also happens to be the disability of her character (she even takes her leg off and hits Pilar with it in one madcap moment) and it successfully and boldly highlights TBTB's mission statement to utilize differently abled performers. If only this indifferently conceived production took that same kind of risk-they might have truly had something.