Regrets Only, at MTC's Stage I
Last week was a busy one, with two concerts and a play. The concerts were both very satisfying, but the play was such an outstanding delight that I shall try to tell you something about it now. I don't want to give away the plot, because a great part of the fun is anticipating, if only by minutes, the direction in which it goes. And I shall try not to re-tell any of the fifteen or so drop-dead jokes.
If I did tell one of the drop-dead jokes, you might not find it all that terribly funny - or, in the case of the Donna Karan joke, you might not get it all. But the New York audience at MTC's Stage I the other night didn't miss a thing. Expectations were high - Christine Baranski and George Grizzard in a Paul Rudnick play!!!! - but they were met and then surpassed. It was obvious from the start that the show was going to be funny, possibly very funny. What was not so obvious was the show's very satisfying ending. So often, comedies turn into overtired three year-olds as the finish approaches: they don't want to end, but they can't quite keep going, either. So they fuss, and when the curtain comes down the audience is simply grateful. Not so at the end of Regrets Only. The play's final moments are just poignant and sweet enough to give a dash of Der Rosenkavalier. Just a dash.
For years if not forever, Paul Rudnick's humor has operated on the assumption that gay men and women - but mostly gay men - already control the world. It is a brave, whistling-in-the-dark way of dealing with a society afflicted by patches of stolid homophobia in which gay men are occasionally beaten to death. In Regrets Only, the playwright lets his postulate off the leash and permits it to rule, if not the world, then the second act of his play. This duplex fantasy, playing on the surface but also shoring up the foundations, is the perfect catalyst for transforming pointless, empty lives into magical ones.
Continue reading about Regrets Only at Portico.
