Baltimore Sun Review
January 24th, 2002
- J. Wynn Rousuck
Funny, touching 'Jeffrey' ,
Paul Rudnick's Jeffrey is a gay romantic comedy set in the early days of the AIDS crisis. If that description sounds like an oxymoron, then you're underestimating the comedic talents of this writer, whose credits include I Hate Hamlet and the screenplay for In & Out.
Adeptly staged at Axis Theatre, Jeffrey is funny and touching, but the script is structurally choppy. Essentially, it's a series of sketches.
There's the game-show sketch, the self-help guru sketch, the fund-raiser sketch, etc. Fun and fanciful as these may be, they're basically window dressing for the plight of the title character, who has sworn off sex and love, and the plight of his closest friends, Sterling and Darius, a gay couple who discover that true love and monogamy are no guarantee of perpetual bliss.
With his boyish looks, blond hair and button-down shirt, Jonas David Grey's Jeffrey is a preppy foil for his colorful friends: Robert Neal Marshall as Sterling, a flamboyant interior designer; and Anthony Viglione, as Darius, a Broadway chorus boy who wears his Cats costume off stage as well as on.
Despite their example of domestic contentment and the sudden appearance of a man (Oscar Ceville) who could be the love of Jeffrey's life, the protagonist is steadfast in his determination to remain celibate. But his decision makes him increasingly miserable, leading him to seek solace everywhere from a meeting of sexual compulsives to the Church (where a lecherous, musical theater-obsessed priest delivers the play's moral: "There's only one real blasphemy - the refusal of joy").
As this irreverent example suggests, there's a strong life-affirming aspect underlying Rudnick's hijinks. Terry J. Long, now directing his third local production of a Rudnick play, establishes a breezy tone, although the crucial final scene takes too long to reach its happy resolution.
A four-member supporting ensemble keeps the sketches zinging along, and the sole female member, Mary Anne Walsh, proves amusingly versatile in roles ranging from the self-help guru to Jeffrey's middle-America mom.
In the end, Jeffrey manages to be wickedly comic, tender and romantic, even if, like true love, its course is not always smooth.
Show times at AXIS, 3600 Clipper Mill Road, are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, and 2 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 10. Tickets cost $12-15. Call 410-243-5267.
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