U.S. Drag
Anyone who moans about theatre’s lack of appeal for - and relevance to - young people has only to catch Gina Gionfriddo’s latest, U.S. Drag, which features a crackling ensemble snazzily directed by Trip Cullman.
The "drag" part might mislead. The play has nothing to do with transvestism, at least overtly: it’s a phrase lifted from William Burroughs’s "Naked Lunch" about the sorry state of U.S. culture. The play’s two central protagonists - recent Vassar roommates Allison (leggy, helium-voiced Tanya Fischer) and Angela (soulful-eyed Lisa Joyce) - are experiencing the downside of entry-level living in Manhattan.
Having bailed out of subsistence jobs Xeroxing in the basement bowels of Conde Nast, they’re subsisting - as once did Holly Golightly - on pity cabfare from soft-touch males concerned for their late-night safety. For shelter, they’ve scammed their way into the apartment of a marriage-minded financial whiz-kid (Matthew Stadelmann, suitably rabid, like a junior Harvey Keitel): they’re supposed to hold parties and attract him a mate.
Suspended "between things," they pin their hopes on the reward attached to dropping a dime on a so-far-unseen serial attacker named Ted, whose modus operandi is innocuously asking for help. Indefatigable clubbers, they figure they’ll run into him eventually, and meanwhile they pray that fate will soon bestow on them all the rewards - fame and fortune - of celebrity victimhood.
As a co-producer and frequent writer for the "Law & Order" series, Gionfriddo knows from victimology and its seamy underside, as she proved in 2004’s "After Ashley." It’s almost as if, in dealing daily with the hideous acts (ripped, as they say, from the headlines) that humans can perpetrate on one another, she turns to theatre as an outlet for the part of her that needs to laugh as well as mourn.
"U.S. Drag" abounds in comic scenes and satiric characters - most notably, compulsive "helper" Ned (goonily gesticulating Lucas Papaelias), who embodies the intractable obtuseness of every touchy-feely crusader you ever encountered, and Christopher (intense Logan Marshall-Green), a famous author of creative nonfiction - "Oxymoronic bullshit, isn’t it?" observes Angela - who’s a bundle of narcissistic self-pity. He had a deprived childhood - deprived of actual abuse, that is.
It’s not just that Gionfriddo is so on top of these topical touch points; she knows how to mete them out among recognizable if extreme characters. There’s real magic at work here, as well as hope for theatre audiences of all ages.
At the Beckett Theatre at Theatre Row (212-279-4200; February 23 - March 16); tickets $20-$37.50.
