OKLAHOMA CITY
By Tom Cole. Directed by Rebecca Bayla Taichman. Set design by Kristin Loeffler. Lighting by Liz Orenstein. Sound by Dana Moser. Costumes by Harriet Voyt. With Christen Clifford and Jon David Weigand. Presented by the Theater Offensive at the Boston Center for the Arts, Wednesday through Sunday through March 17.

“I’m just a girl who can’t say no.” The line, from an upbeat ode to venial naughtiness in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, falls tunelessly off the tongue of a mortally naughty man in Oklahoma City, Tom Cole’s atmospheric and allusive new comedy about sickness, death, and other everyday horrors. John, a performance artist, may or may not be fibbing for effect when he claims he can’t turn down a chance to go down on another man, any man. To the end, John’s sexual compulsions and most of his aims remain murky, as do those of his friend and co-conspirator, Mary. But John makes no bones about the one fixation that seems hard-wired to his id: he is madly obsessed with death. When the Grim Reaper is doing the asking, he’s just a guy who won’t say no, even if he doesn’t understand the question. Suicide, homicide, and mass murder are all within his repertoire, motivation optional.

Of course, the title of this odd comedy of terrors brings the McVeigh bombing immediately to mind. But the script, Cole’s first full-length play (as opposed to performance piece), evokes the Oklahoma City attack only obliquely until the end, when a ludicrously implausible disaster is passed off as a blessing in dark disguise. Up to that point a funny and affecting pastiche of arch repartee and artful innuendo, the play is loosely basted together not by plot but by quirky allusions to the original 1943 stage version of Oklahoma!, which was less sunny than the 1955 celluloid adaptation.

Despite one red-herring reference to a day John spends at a hospital emergency room after buying some fertilizer, explosions occur only between the legs of the two characters. While high on crack, John and Mary do one hell of a dry-hump together. Otherwise, they keep to themselves, sexually speaking, but speak often of sex, sometimes in graphic detail. “But he is HIV-positive, I know that, and I used his ejaculate as a lubricant,” is the first line out of John’s mouth. Later, John adopts an overblown, cynical tone whenever he’s obsessing about his symptoms or recalling his unprotected encounters with HIV-positive men. (“We laughed, talked, fucked. Two sacks of liquid yanking at each other’s organs.”) Mary, in turn, is sardonic and lyrical while telling John florid stories about breast cancer and chemotherapy treatments: “My eyes, blue; my skin, green; my vagina, purple; my fingers, small yellow lizards. I will give birth to orange tornadoes and small plastic ladders. I will fly through blood-red sky and dance a polka with the tornadoes.”

Whenever the two talk, and talk is nearly all they do, John and Mary treat unsafe sex, deadly illness, and other dark subjects with the same wry and irreverent theatricality they employ in the pranks and performances they foist on the unsuspecting public in the name of art. The pair’s public performances are as sophomoric and pointless as the play’s unfortunate denouement. But the wiseass act John and Mary stage in private, each for the benefit of the other, is witty and imaginative, as are the allusions to Oklahoma! that flash and fade throughout the dialogue like fireflies blinking on an inky summer night. With music, mood, and a few poetic monologues, the playwright makes it clear that the duo’s clowning is a way of whistling in the dark, a cover for fears and facts too frightening to face.

Guided by Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s bold and discerning direction, the Theater Offensive’s world-premiere production captures all the shading in Cole’s script and adds color. Kristen Loeffler’s spare, fenced set is arresting in itself, and its simplicity makes way for Liz Orenstein’s intricate, dynamic lighting effects. Dana Moser’s funny and often startling sound design adds several layers of reference — to film noir and horror flicks, for example — on top of the Oklahoma! tunes. Both actors — Christen Clifford and Jon David Weigand — burnish what should shine and leave the rest rough. Freud may or may not be right about the sex/death thing, but Clifford and Weigand create a polymorphous chemistry to die for.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001