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[Theater reviews]

Three’s company
David Marshall Grant’s Snakebit

BY ROBERT DAVID SULLIVAN

SNAKEBIT
By David Marshall Grant. Directed by Lois Roach. Set design by Eric Levenson. Lighting by C. Scott Ananian. Costumes by Michelle Dowd. Sound by Matt Griffin. With Adrianne Krstansky, Jeffrey Mello, Robert Pemberton, and Jason Schuchman. Presented by SpeakEasy Stage Company at the BCA Theatre, through April 14.

If we could just become more like each other, one character tells a friend at the end of Snakebit, we’d both get through life a lot easier. It’s an appropriate sentiment for a tart comedy that seems equally pitched toward gay and straight audiences. An Off Broadway success in 1998, Snakebit was the first produced work by David Marshall Grant, who until then was better known as an actor (from the Broadway production of Angels in America). Its Boston premiere, by the SpeakEasy Stage Company, is not entirely successful, but Grant’s playwriting skills come through pretty well.

The play opens with a good-looking gay man in his 30s preparing to move out of his Los Angeles home. Michael (Jeffrey Mello) has just been dumped by his closeted lover, Gary, a radio personality who emulates Howard Stern. Once a ballet dancer and now a social worker for troubled teens, Michael is a good citizen gone amok. He washes and reuses aluminum foil, and he wanted to adopt one of his young clients — two points of disagreement that led to Gary’s departure. In this production, at least, he’s also incapable of packing books in a box.

Michael is visited by two New Yorkers, childhood friend Jonathan (Robert Pemberton) and wife Jenifer (Adrianne Krstransky). The self-depreciating Jenifer is an actress with a stuttering problem (it’s indicative of the playwright’s good taste that he doesn’t wring much comedy out of this) who prefers her sideline job of making “wheatless, dairyless, and sugarless brownies.” When Jenifer admits that the brownies are not totally sugarless, Michael has a vision of diabetics dropping to the floor all over Manhattan. Early on, we find out that Michael and Jenifer secretly slept with each other a few months before her wedding.

This double dose of earnestness is balanced by Jonathan, a cocky actor who got his break in Die Hard–type action flicks. (As we know from The Big Chill and other films, this is shorthand for selling out.) Jonathan ridicules Michael for walking a neighbor’s dog without charging a fee. He is quicker to return calls from his agent than from the babysitter of his six-year-old daughter, Emma, who keeps throwing up back in New York. Jonathan jokes that he’d rather be gay, offering selfish reasons (no pressure to have kids or to be monogamous), though I suspect that he actually envies Michael’s more sensitive nature.

The first act of Snakebit is about as talky as a play can get, with no plot to grab onto and a familiar reliance on performing as a metaphor for life. It is not joky, however, and Grant’s choosiness with one-liners keeps his characters bearable. When Michael complains about his ex-lover, for example, Jonathan snaps, “If you wanted selflessness and decency, you should be with a woman.” In a lesser comedy, this remark might be lost within too-perfect dialogue; here, it asks us to think about its relevance to all three characters. The second act moves more quickly, tying together Emma’s illness, Michael and Jenifer’s secret, and a young man (Jason Schuchman) who drops in to look at the house and explain to us the play’s title (something to do with the resilience of Liz Taylor). The final scene — which somehow invests hope in the statement “You don’t have to be a victim to prove that the world sucks” — is conclusive without being too convenient.

With so much of Snakebit devoted to a debate about life philosophies, just about any production of the play is going to betray a slight bias toward one of the characters. In the SpeakEasy version, Robert Pemberton’s Jonathan is so much more dynamic than the other performers that I bought his act-now, think-later approach almost immediately — a leap of faith that Jonathan himself might find questionable, since he eventually apologizes for much of his behavior. With an appealingly boyish laugh, Pemberton turns his character into a cross between Ayn Rand and Auntie Mame, teaching the more introspective characters how to behave “in the real world.” Even when he says, “I’m your best friend — you’re supposed to talk to me whether or not I’m nice,” he’s easier to take than Mello’s passive Michael, who whines, “You have no idea what it feels like to be me.”

My preference would be for Mello to match Pemberton’s energy level, though Krstransky’s understatement is acceptable for a character who’s tired of her A-personality husband. I don’t know whether the uneven match between the two male characters is a deliberate move on the part of director Lois Roach — who, it must be said, makes a play without much action seem much shorter than its two-hour-plus running time. Pemberton’s winning performance spares his audience the discomfort of conceding some of Jonathan’s points after it’s spent most of the play hating him, but it does take some of the bite out of Snakebit.

Issue Date: March 29-April 5, 2001