Gun-Shy takes on the plot outline of Private Lives, Noël Coward’s beloved 1930 comedy about marital musical chairs, but has little else in common with the British classic. Although playwright Richard Dresser can toss off the quips and escalate ordinary situations to comic proportions, he doesn’t here create characters you give a damn about, and that diminishes the proceedings to little more than an evening of theatrical cotton candy.
Performed on a stripped-down stage that’s bordered by a red frame, with furniture sliding in and out on casters, the first act introduces two couples, Evie and Carter alternating with Caitlin and Duncan. Evie and Duncan are divorced, and both are looking for new permanent partners. Problem is, they’ve found Carter and Caitlin, each of whom is afraid of the " C " word (i.e., commitment).
Act one is structured as a series of short scenes flipping from one couple to the other, à la David Mamet in Sexual Perversity in Chicago, to establish the boundaries of the battlefields on which the new couplings will maneuver. We do, however, hear a lot about previous skirmishes with the exes. The second act takes place in Duncan’s home (from which Evie walked), where the two couples meet to celebrate the birthday of Evie and Duncan’s 13-year-old son, Jack. He never arrives from prep school for the party because a blizzard has descended on the East Coast, and the foursome are snowed in — surely, in Dresser’s intention, a reprise of the confinement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit.
Evie and Caitlin are such nightmares of male invention that it’s hard to believe any man would put up with either of them. Evie operates by the rules of another " C " word (controlling), whereas Caitlin, who is, in Evie’s words, " thin, thin, thin, young, young, young, " is a dither-brain who feigns hip attitudes about independence but is fearful of the world. There are all sorts of jokes about her diet (she hasn’t eaten for 79 days, by her count), as if we were supposed to find anorexia funny. The men are little better. Coffee-salesman Carter is pretentious about his importance to his customers and insecure about his manhood. Another spate of gags revolves around his fear of being touched by a male masseur who is flamboyantly gay.
To the credit of MRT artistic director Charles Towers, who helms the production, the play unrolls with no let-up, and the action, ratcheted up to farce proportions by the end, does draw laughs. In general, the cast seems to have been instructed to stretch the characters toward caricature, except for Brian Keeler, who as Duncan finds some reality in his confusion. Deirdre Madigan, as Evie, sounds like a shrew until she finally realizes that Duncan did indeed love and need her. Aidan Sullivan is cutesy-pie as the female sex toy but never lets up on the antics. Joseph Adams makes Carter into a yuppie wanna-be in the manner of the Marlboro Man, but with lots of doubts about hanging onto the saddle. David Diaz is suitably chameleon-like in the quick changes he’s required to make for the variety of extra persons he portrays.
To be sure, there’s a moral in Gun-Shy — something about the perils of ignoring the happiness in your own back yard. And one can draw plenty of conclusions about modern relationships from the pathetic shallowness of the pairings. But there’s nothing new to chew on. With the renaissance of playwriting in this country and abroad, and the huge number of dramatists whose work has yet to be presented on Greater Boston stages, it’s hard to understand slotting in this play, even though it comes wrapped in positive reviews for its Off Broadway production.
In contrast to the pre-Towers MRT practice of casting primarily solid Boston actors, the play would appear to have been cast out of New York. These actors are good enough but not notably better than those in the local talent pool. One hopes that Towers, who assumed the directorship of the Lowell company a year ago, has not instituted a new policy. Perhaps he needs to learn the lesson of the play he’s just directed with regard to finding worth in what you have at home.
