THEATER REVIEW
“One Slight Hitch”
Grade: C+
Through Jan. 25. 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 4 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $25-$35. Roswell Cultural Arts Center, 950 Forrest St., Roswell. 770-641-1260, www.get.org.
Bottom line: Utterly uninspired.
Despite his reputation as a gruff, irascible and highly energized stand-up comic (and occasional social pundit on Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show”), Lewis Black proves to be a rather wimpy playwright with his tame, dawdling and entirely conventional comedy “One Slight Hitch.”
The setting of the play is 1981, the dawn of the Reagan era (the show opens with an audio clip from his inauguration speech). “America was back on track,” notes a teenage girl who narrates parts of the story, when she isn’t listening to Blondie and Kim Carnes on her Walkman. “You could smell the hope in the air.”
Whether or not Black’s trying to be ironic or satirical is unclear in director Alan Kilpatrick’s staging for Georgia Ensemble Theatre. Given the Roswell troupe’s customarily older and more conservative core audience, frankly, it’s likelier that all of the girl’s recurring Republicanisms might be pitched as so much straight talk.
In any event, the scene is a spacious suburban Cincinnati home (designed by Seamus Bourne), the situation a hectic wedding day. When the bride’s oblivious ex-boyfriend suddenly drops by unannounced, a lot of predictable and formulaic havoc ensues.
But Kilpatrick’s production is no better honed as a physical farce than is Black’s script in defining its own identity. Things develop and unfold at an almost leisurely pace, with little real sense of spontaneity or calamity to match the frenzied machinations of the plot.
Seasoned actors Mark Cabus (“The Geller Girls” at the Alliance) and Karen Howell (Aurora’s “Clyde & Bonnie”) make the best of their shticky roles as the increasingly flustered parents of the bride (played by Kelly Criss). In a couple of amusing bits, they pantomime conversations with their youngest daughter, that narrator (Bekah Medford), whenever she opts to plug in her earphones and drown them out to her music.
Howell, in particular, also registers in one of the show’s rare moments of insight and restraint, delivering an emotional speech about life and marriage with such clarity that it feels like a needless embellishment when designer Bryan Rosengrant melodramatically dims the lights over the course of the scene.
Unnecessary, too, is the whole character of the family’s other daughter, a wise-cracking, man-hungry lush (poor Jennifer Alice Acker).
A fixture at the Shakespeare Tavern, Matt Felten (who’s married to Criss in real life) portrays the intended groom, a nerdy clinical psychologist. Primarily cast in musical roles (his Lancelot stole the Ensemble’s “Camelot” last year), Jeremy Wood plays the former flame. They’re fine, likable actors both, if never exactly on the same page here.
The central conflict of the comedy ought to seem like a case of choosing between the lesser of two so-called evils. While Felten exaggerates his role beyond any logical reason, Wood’s performance is underdone, somewhat more mellow and genial than downright flaky or obnoxious. Which of them is the “romantic” and which the “realist” is ultimately a moot point.
Black peppers the dialogue with liberal doses of his signature profanity, but in large part, “One Slight Hitch” is devoid of much genuine flavor — or humor.
