As it is, “I Wanna [expletive] Tear You Apart,” a sketchy comedy-drama by Morgan Gould, doesn’t amount to much in the first place. What’s worse, not even a director with Melissa Foulger’s proven abilities (e.g., Theatrical Outfit’s exquisite “Bright Half Life” last year) manages to accomplish a lot in the way of overcoming that sad reality in her middling rendition for Out Front Theatre, a co-production with the Florida-based company Island City Stage.
Credit: Sydney Lee
Credit: Sydney Lee
An gay man, Leo (Matthew Busch), and an admittedly overweight woman, nicknamed Sam (Sofia Palmero), are roommates with a shared affinity for video games and binge-watching “Top Chef” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” Both of them are aspiring novelists with mundane day jobs, although Sam seems to be more proactive about pursuing her literary ambitions than Leo, who’s just as content to keep hitting her up to cover his half of the rent, among various other financial burdens. He claims she’s “like a sister” to him, with the added benefit that she also cleans his bedroom.
What exactly Sam gets out of their strictly platonic, theoretically “co-dependent” relationship remains largely dubious at best. It’s not as though she hasn’t found a traditional boyfriend — at one point, we hear his prerecorded voice calling to her from her open bedroom door — but when Leo eventually befriends a co-worker, Chloe (Megan Zhang, a likable standout in the cast of three), Sam suddenly goes on the defensive, finally resorting to desperate measures to have Leo all to herself.
The play’s episodic structure initially suggests the story will span the course of a year. Video monitors on either side of the stage project title cards to indicate the individual months before each scene. Still, as it develops, Gould never really bothers sticking to her own proposed chronology.
Forget a totally extraneous prologue of sorts, in which we’re introduced to Sam and Leo, who are heavily disguised and provocatively dancing beneath a shimmering disco ball. In addition, there’s not one, but two epilogue sequences tacked on at the end; the first takes place “maybe six months later,” or so the title card tells us, and the second unfolds another five years after that.
It could have been more interesting or productive — and certainly no less contrived or protracted — to somehow transplant or incorporate those segments into the plot’s primary time frame. Why not, especially if the only notable distinction about February, for instance, presents a brief, unspoken moment where Sam discovers one of Leo’s empty water bottles in the refrigerator late one night, and angrily throws it back into his bedroom? Or when the representative highlight from May, apparently, offers a cursory glimpse of Leo clipping his toenails while watching an episode of “The Golden Girls”?
Palmero’s performance is moderately affecting, although the script scarcely provides her enough to work with in terms of validating the lengths to which Sam is willing to go to maintain her hold on Leo, or to explain why she’d want to, particularly after selling her novel and pocketing a hefty advance. Instead, Gould misdirects her attention on raising doubts and fabricating possible ulterior motives with regard to Zhang’s Chloe, an otherwise ostensibly sympathetic bystander in the messy mix.
For his part, during most of the show, poor Busch is required (or opts) to exaggerate Leo as a whining, flighty, borderline-offensive stereotype, which only makes it more implausible that either Sam or Chloe would go to such trouble or exert so much effort on his behalf. The actor vastly improves in the last half, when his character effectively tones down and plays it straight, so to speak. As Leo unavoidably realizes, “It’s time to grow up.”
Nonetheless, in the not-so-grand scheme, that’s too little of a foregone conclusion, and it comes far too late.
THEATER REVIEW
“I Wanna [expletive] Tear You Apart”
Through Feb. 18. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays; 8 p.m. Monday (Feb. 13). $15-$25. Out Front Theatre, 999 Brady Avenue NW, Atlanta. 404-448-2755, outfronttheatre.com.
Bottom line: A dud that shreds any credibility.
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