Broadway comedies bashing Hollywood mores are nearly as old as Broadway and Hollywood themselves.
In his 2007 Tony-nominated Broadway play "The Little Dog Laughed," New York generator Douglas Carter Beane takes up the cudgel with zest, aiming squarely at such time-honored targets as mercenary showbiz agents, self-involved movie stars and producers who grind daring drama into blandly palatable projection screen fare.
What Beane tackles here which most of his predecessors steered clear of, are sincere matters of sexual personal identity and the nature of love � concerns that, on juncture, elevate "Little Dog" above the horizontal surface of cute cartoonishness.
But what really fuels the play is the motor-mouth monologues of Diane � played by Christa Scott-Reed with verbal flair and claws-bared �lan, in Intiman Theatre's local debut of "The Little Dog Laughed."
Model-thin and dressed to kill in costumer Elizabeth Hope Clancy's swanky evening wear and designer power suits, Scott-Reed is a sharp-elbowed Dream Factory scrap vet with zero illusions about her main client, Mitchell (Neal Bledsoe).
She's departure to bank vault him into superstardom, whatsoever it takes. And when Mitchell's "slight, recurring case of homoeroticism" rears its head in a het romance with a danton True Young male tart, Alex (Quinlan Corbett), Scott-Reed's Diane swoops in to do impairment control.
She orders Mitchell to "butch it up" and contrives schemes to neutralise those annoying New Yorkers, Alex and his onetime lover Ellen (Megan Hill). And the plum at stake, for her fake-straight client Mitchell? The role of a gay man, in a big Hollywood film of a attain play.
Beane artfully piles on the ironies of a gay man pretending to be straight, to play gay. And did we mention that Diane is herself a closeted lesbian?
Diane's machinations, and the Eve Arden-esque assessments of Hollywood realpolitik, ar snappily extortionate and mirthsome. (She's first cousin, by the way, to the loquacious, mythic con-woman Alexa, in Beane's earlier play "As Bees in Honey Drown.")
Act 1 dwells ab initio on the unlikely matter of Bledsoe's handsome, hungriness Mitchell and Corbett's piquant Alex. Their loaded first-class honours degree encounter, after a boozy Mitchell orders up a "rent boy" from a prostitute service, is essentially a long tease. (It's also sexually explicit, with some near-total nudity.)
The affair raises one of Beane's more thoughtful points: that even gorgeous young gays may thirst male affectionateness, as a great deal (or more) as male sex. And while the two things are non mutually exclusive, they ar not synonymous.
No surprise, though, that the New Yorkers come proscribed of this with more heart than the Tinsel Towners do.
Alex, with his unlikely simply appealing lack of jadedness, truly grapples with conflicting feelings, in a coarse-textured turn by Corbett (a Seattle role player getting a well-deserved break here.).
And Alex's off-on lover Ellen (spunkily played by Hill, a Seattle stage alum and recent Harvard University grade) also matures, from potty-mouthed party girl to a person with (at least temporary) signs of emotional depth.
Fracaswell Hyman's direction mines the script's lode of humor adroitly, aided by Matthew Smucker's sleek settings, whirring along on a crimson-hued turntable. Joseph Swartz's sound design favors the droll erotic love songs of Cole Porter � a closeted sunny man, with a lesbian wife.
Diane's have nascent wild-eyed feelings for Mitchell evaporate as her brittleness increases. But hey, diddle victimize (as the nursery rime that elysian the title goes), it's really her cattiness we're meant to adore.
And though Beane suggests reasons for it (such as the sexism of Hollywood higher-ups), she's soundless a gorgon. Just as Mitchell is, ultimately, a male bimbo � peculiarly given the contrived, tone-shifting ending.
"The Little Dog Laughed" makes good on all the Hollywood-bashing chortles it promises, just doesn't give way all the deeper epiphanies and insights it hints at. That makes us care a lot less in the end about Diane and Mitchell than we mightiness have. But the laughs they provide are placid delicious.
Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com
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