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Pictured: Daina Griffith, Joel Van Liew, and Brian Beacock. Photo by Meghan Moore.
Comedy. It often seems like the poor cousin of the theater world, relegated to a position below serious drama and musicals. When was the last time a true comedy (even a bittersweet one) won the Pulitzer Prize? That would be Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers in 1991. At best, you might get “black comedy,” which is basically humor that no one thinks is funny. But Simon, Christopher Durang, and Alan Ayckbourn seem like anachronisms – okay maybe Ayckbourn should be an anachronism – in a world where theater companies favor plays about identity and personal crisis. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with plays that have real meaning, just as there is nothing wrong with wanting to laugh out loud and forget all your troubles.
Under Sean Daniels, Merrimack Repertory Theatre has been bucking this trend by presenting a number of indisputable comedies, most of them, interestingly, written by women. Because maybe we have we sold comedy short. Not only does it allow the audience to experience what Wendy MacLeod, the author of Slow Food, calls the “joy of shared laughter,” it shows that the best time to deliver a message is when the receiver isn’t looking.
Think about the satirization of American politics in Lila Rose Kaplan’s Home of the Brave or her attack on gender roles in the workplace and in comics (!) in Villians’ Supper Club. And while we were chuckling at the antics of the acrimonious neighbors in Native Gardens by Karen Zacarías, we were also immersed in a struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots,” the young and the old, the established and the immigrant – and pondering where we fit in. Comedy gives us permission to laugh at ourselves – and see the humanity in the other side.
And so in MacLeod’s Slow Food, as we howl in cathartic frustration, it doesn’t matter whether you identify with the hungry couple or with the put-upon waiter, you see yourself. For when the laughter dies down (and the food is finally served) the play reveals itself to be a cautionary tale, as the three characters take stock of their lives at the midway point, with lots of regrets but still many possibilities ahead. Carpe diem, the play seems to say, or you may end up an over-stressed man with a drinking problem (maybe), a woman who never reached her potential, or a waiter who is all he is ever going to be.
–Karla Sorenson, Cohort
Slow Food runs January 9 – February 3