Dew Point
By Neena Beber. Directed by Simon Hammerstein. Set design by Susan E. Sanders. Costumes by Molly Trainer. Lighting by Dina Gjertsen. Sound by Jesse Soursourian. With Bill Mootos, Laura Napoli, Marianne Ryan, Michael Sáenz, and Emme Shaw. At Gloucester Stage Company, Wednesday through Sunday through July 15.

Emotional condensation can be as drippy as the real kind, so it is to playwright Neena Beber’s credit that Dew Point isn’t. This latest work by the author of the award-winning Jump/Cut, which was performed at Gloucester Stage Company last summer, is more than the sum of its synopsis, in which a happily attached woman sets up one of her friends with a womanizing ex-boyfriend and everyone does not live happily ever after. The success of this deceptively labeled “romantic comedy” lies in the way it zeroes in on how we deceive others by deceiving ourselves, plumping the bread of friendship into some pretty rancid sandwiches that are, of course, proffered with the best of intentions.

Beber’s heroine, Mimi, is a freelance authenticator of historic documents who’s recently gotten engaged to a lawyer who cooks. As the play opens, she is trying out an engagement gift from ex-lover and current friend Jack — a single chair of his own design, which may or may not be a passive-aggressive sort of present to give a couple. (In the Gloucester Stage Company production, it’s basically an Eames chair, though Jack is obviously not the designer Charles Eames.) When friend Phyllis happens along, Jack hits on her; she finds him cute, and Mimi gives the pair her blessing, though without enthusiasm, since Jack is either, as she puts it, an “out-of-control overlapper” or, in the words of fiancé Kai, an “obvious rogue.” For the record: when he meets Phyllis, the 40-year-old Jack is in a relationship with 21-year-old actress/dancer Greta, out the door of which he swears he has at least one foot.

But Jack has design and designer flaws. By act two, the floor of a trendy bar he masterminded has collapsed — moist air, having reached its dew point, condensed in a wall until it gave way. Such things happen in life as well, and according to Jack, they, like the buckled bar, are not his fault. He chalks up his two-timing, and the dishonesty it entails, to a biological imperative he alone is courageous enough to acknowledge. Setting up the play’s best line, Jack confides in Kai that he mentally undresses every woman he sees. Kai responds that he used to do that too. What happened, Jack wonders? “I turned 16.”

The biggest failing of Dew Point is that Jack is just not as irresistible as he and Beber would have it — and that’s not actor Bill Mootos’s fault. An attractive fellow, he does his best to render this silky, rationalizing snake seductive, but Beber has made the character too odious and unprincipled a lothario — Mary McCarthy wouldn’t set Lillian Hellman up with this guy without putting a skull-and-crossbones on the wrapping. Which plays havoc with the elaborate convolution of good and bad motives, adult aspirations, and repressed feelings that allows Mimi to serve Jack as enabler and confidante and serve him up, however worriedly, to her friends.

But the play’s strengths outweigh its faults — it’s a comedy of sexual manners whose characters are funny yet sympathetic and complexly believable (though Kai may be a little too good to be true). Even the dogged, neurotic, orange-juice-addicted Greta — part Lolita, part Clare Boothe Luce — is not without points; her tirade regarding breezy, civilized friendship with people who once sucked your private parts is priceless (and not that dumb). And in Emme Shaw’s relaxed if discombobulated thinking-girl’s performance, Mimi’s struggle to strip down to her own bare motivations is telling without being maudlin. (The character does, however, need to lose lines like “You are reckless with people’s hearts!”)

Simon Hammerstein, who directed last year’s Jump/Cut, is again at the helm of the GSC production, which zips along, the short scenes almost bumping into one other on Susan E. Sanders’s workable if low-rent set. Michael Sáenz is a confident, deadpan Kai; Marianne Ryan, as Phyllis, captures both the giddiness of a woman smitten and the fury of one duped; and Laura Napoli is a flaky yet wonderfully determined Greta. And Mootos delivers all the smug smoothness of a self-perceived gift to women off whose back the words “Return to sender” simply roll.

Issue Date: July 12-19, 2001