Daily Loaf

Paul Rudnick’s The New Century starts out incandescent, loses a little effulgence in its second scene, becomes decidedly lackluster in its third, and fizzles out completely in its fourth and fifth. The American Stage “After Hours” production offers two outstanding performances — by Annie Morrison and Matthew McGee — and even during its least interesting moments, there’s always a chance that witty Rudnick will deliver another zinger. But clever jokes aren’t enough to hold a play together, and The New Century comes off finally as a series of unconnected sketches. It’s too bad, because the author has a message to deliver about the need for straight/gay cooperation. As it stands, that message can just barely be heard.

The play begins brilliantly, with the gifted Morrison playing Helene, a Long Island Jewish matron addressing a chapter of the Parents of Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, The Transgendered, The Questioning, The Curious, The Creatively Concerned and Others. What Helene has to say is that she (grudgingly) adores all three of her gay children — including Ronnie, who’s become Veronica, and David, who’s into scatology — and that she must be “the most accepting, the most tolerant, and the most loving mother of all time.” From start to finish, her monologue is sophisticated, wide-ranging, ingeniously topical and hilarious. And Morrison plays it all with self-satirizing brilliance.

Then we come to scene two: the Florida cable television show “Too Gay!” hosted by the flamboyant Mr. Charles, played nearly perfectly by McGee. Thanks to this performer, the sequence is funny and unpredictable, but few of its jokes are as good as scene one’s, and Mr. Charles’ relationship with his muscular sidekick Shane — played just adequately by Jonathan Lovitz — isn’t very interesting or telling. Further, a segment during which Mr. Charles reads letters from viewers (“Dear Mr. Charles: do you enjoy gay theater?”) is almost consistently mediocre.

But if we were troubled by scene two, we’re baffled by scene three, which has Carolyn Zaput playing Barbara Ellen, a craftswoman who wants to entertain us with her kooky inventions (e.g., a tuxedo for her toaster). Relevance returns when we learn that her gay son died of AIDS, but there’s no understanding why we had to hear long minutes of tedious crafts-speak to get to that revelation.

Finally, scenes four and five bring all characters together in a way that never makes sense, and the end of the play is so puzzling, I wouldn’t have known what it was if there hadn’t been a poster saying “The End.” The other audience members seemed as startled by the fact as I was.

Still the show has its strengths: there’s Morrison and McGee’s acting, along with T. Scott Wooten’s fine directing and Adrin Erra Puente’s vibrant costumes (yellow and pink for Mr. Charles). And American Stage deserves kudos for adding on more and more “After Hours” shows. At least we have a chance to judge Rudnick’s play for ourselves this season; in previous years, it would never have come to the area at all.

So maybe there’s reason, after all, to feel good about The New Century.

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