KING O’ THE MOON
By Tom Dudzick. Directed by Steve Stettler. Set design by Crystal Tiala. Costumes by Frances Nelson McSherry. Lighting by Tom Sturge. With Brian Abascal, Gideon Banner, Tommy Day Carey, Chloe Leamon, Linda Amendola, Alisha Jansky, and Michael T. Francis. At Merrimack Repertory Theatre, Lowell, Wednesday through Sunday through March 25.

King O’ the Moon is set in July of 1969, as Neil Armstrong is about to walk on the orb of the title. The play, alas, is more earthbound. A family comedy set in a Buffalo working-class neighborhood, it continues the saga of the Polish-Catholic Pazinski clan, begun by playwright Tom Dudzick in his 1959-set Over the Tavern. That play, a hit at Merrimack Rep five seasons ago, is unlikely to outlive the Church it tweaks. But with its precocious adolescent protagonist perkily defying Catholic dogma, it’s funny if formulaic. King O’ the Moon moves from the cramped apartment above the family booze biz to the back yard, where it camps on an interesting spot of American history, setting Armstrong’s triumphant moonwalk against the deepening mire of the Vietnam conflict. But Dudzick’s now-young-adult characters mostly recycle childhood rivalries and ribaldries while piggybacking on momentous events both national and familial.

Like the Neil Simon trilogy of Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound, Dudzick’s three-part, partly autobiographical saga (the conclusion, The Last Mass at St. Casimir’s, is set in 1979) layers sit-com wisecracks with would-be poignancy — though the humor, understandably, is more Communion-Wafer Belt than Borscht. Ten years have passed since Over the Tavern, and smart-mouth parochial-school rebel Rudy has become a seminarian currently AWOL from his priest’s training to participate in an antiwar demonstration and attend the annual Pazinski picnic in commemoration of late patriarch Chet. Older brother Eddie has been drafted; he’s about to ship out to ’Nam, leaving pregnant wife Maureen (a former neighborhood Pop-Tart whose maiden nickname was Easy-Make Blake) in the heaving bosom of his family. This includes sister Annie, who is poised to divorce a man more married to his electric trains than to her; lovable retarded brother Georgie, whom Dudzick treats more warmly than exploitively; and no-nonsense widowed mom Ellen, who has taken up with the family friend with whom she now operates the tavern.

The play begins, on an empty stage, with a duet of double-entendre. Radio coverage of the moon launch, coming from a window above the tavern, duels with sounds from the room over the garage where Eddie and Maureen have retreated from the paper-walled intimacy of the family abode to have sex. (Apparently the thrust and trajectory are good on both fronts.) Next Rudy arrives home with tear gas in his hair. He wants to drive Eddie to Canada, thus depriving his resentful older brother of the opportunity to be a hero. At the center of the play — too much of which takes the form of remember-when — is loss of innocence. Eddie, all uniformed up and gung ho to go, learns the awful truth of the war from a neighborhood chum just back. Rudy, recognizing the emptiness and rigidity of the Church-dictated pieties he has to offer either Eddie or Annie, must let go of his clerical dream. Worst of all, the Pazinski sibs must face the reality of Mom as a, gasp, sexual being. This is an old story, but the Merrimack cast milks it well, reacting to the news with amusing mortification.

In fact, Steve Stettler’s production wrings what it can from this slight — and slightly antiquated — material. Moonlighting Blue Man Gideon Banner is a mischievous yet earnest Rudy. Chloe Leamon mines both toughness and girlishness from Ellen, and Michael T. Francis is sweetly manly as her barkeep suitor. Tommy Day Carey is a fierce grown-up-but-still-wounded bully-boy Eddie, though Alisha Jansky skirts cartoon agitation as Annie. Brian Abascal makes Georgie a complete, if mentally and verbally challenged, family member. And Linda Amendola, as still-freewheeling Maureen, makes an appealing case for the Catholic-school wanton. In one of the play’s better exchanges, as she and Annie try to eulogize a onetime neighborhood pest just killed in Vietnam, Maureen plaintively regrets the handjob not given. To which the appalled Annie replies, “You even grieve dirty!”

Clearly, Dudzick vividly remembers this particular bygone world defined by family dust-ups and values conceived in the looming, arbitrary shadow of the Church. But there is more glib nostalgia than urgency or insight in King O’ the Moon. It’s one small step from sit-com and no large step for mankind.

Issue Date: March 8-15, 2001