KXT on Broadway, April 30
6/10
At a time when the madness and lies of electioneering bedevils us, IRL could almost seem sane. It’s not. I doubt that even a Trumpet of Patriots policy meeting could be crazier. If you can imagine As You Like It crossed with texting argot, computer games, Marvel comics, psychotropic hallucinations and angst-ridden teenage love, it may be you’re the playwright, Lewis Treston – or you might just be dreaming you are.
Alexei (Andrew Fraser) has been using Tumblr to chat up Thaddeus (Leon Walshe) for long enough to become curious to meet him in real life (hence the plays’ title). He tries to tell his bestie, Taylor (Bridget Haberecht), of his scheme, but she’s a little detached, having been scooped up by a talent scout and into the arms of Hollywood, where she plays a vengeful comic-book TV character called Phoenix.
Did I mention that Alexei is wearing a self-made princess costume all the while? No? It’s easy to overlook such details in a play like this. Anyway, Alexei arranges to meet Thaddeus at a Supanova event, and that’s when things really start to go wrong, with jumbled identities topping the list.
Had a lesser actor played Alexei, the play could easily seem like the first fumbling efforts of an overheated teen imagination. (Treston’s actually double that age.) With Fraser in the role, it just about works. Amid the relentless zaniness, Treston has built in flashes of genuine humanity, and Fraser makes Alexei not only funny, but likable and touchingly vulnerable.
Similarly, Walshe has the brainy Thaddeus seething with such shyness and self-consciousness that for the first few seconds you think the actor might be super-nervous. While their date is a first for both of them, Thaddeus hasn’t even come out yet, and Walshe plays the ingenue with wide-eyed wonder and anxiety.
Haberect struggles to make Taylor work – as even a young Meryl Streep may have done. She comes into her own more as the ruthless Phoenix, who helpfully points out the evils of screen-dominated lives, and even more so as Madam Malheur, a fake French dressmaker who spurs Alexei into chasing his dream of love. Dominic Lui, meanwhile, is highly amusing in several lesser roles, including a talking fish.
Director Eugene Lynch had to solve dozens of staging problems bequeathed by Treston, compounded by this theatre’s small stage, with the audience on two sides. Yet, somehow, all the manic and hallucinogenic stage directions explode into life, notably in an elaborate joke of a fight sequence, choreographed by Cassidy McDermott-Smith. And Lily Mateljian must have thought it was Christmas, designing costumes for a show obsessed with cosplay.
By the end, Taylor declares she doesn’t want to live in a fantasy any more. Had it been longer than 100 minutes, I might have felt the same. As it is, the play remains entertaining, while giving one’s silliness tolerance a stern test.
Until May 10.