TIMING: Wisdom and insight are The Secret of Comedy. |
| The Secret of Comedy | by Michael Kimball | Directed by Michael Howard | With Lisa Stathoplos | Presented by the Players’ Ring and the New YORK Theatre Company | at the Players' Ring in Portsmouth, NH | through September 23 | 603.436.8123 |
When we say “comic relief,” we mean the funny stuff that briefly eases some variety of serious, distressing tension. But what happens when that levity becomes the modus operandi, so constant that relief actually comes in breakthroughs of genuine grief or anger? We’re dealing with a very fierce breed of comedy when the vivacious Emily, a comedienne and comedy writer, is hit with a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, given a three-week prognosis, and moved to draft a “reverse-sympathy card” to her hypothetical enemies: “Roses are red, violets are blue; I’m dead, fuck you.” Death is a laughing matter in The Secret of Comedy, an emotional wringer of a new play by local playwright Michael Kimball, directed by Michael Howard for The New YORK Theatre Company and The Players’ Ring, and starring the magnificent Lisa Stathoplos.Needless to say, Emily bans crying. She approaches her disease with the same warm and mischievous irreverence with which she has clearly long saturated her world of closest intimates.
Her husband Dave (Michael Crocker), grown daughter Carey (Carolyn Connolly), and best friend Katie (Kate Bossi) know her too well to be surprised by her wisecracks, although they are no match for her wit, wisdom, and acceptance — at least not at first.
Crocker’s thoughtfully dry Dave has the most stoic and measured of the reactions; there is a lot to feel in his gaze. Carey, on the other hand, herself a budding comic, cleaves to desperate sarcasm and an often savagely-tinged humor as her coping technique. In Connolly’s hands, she is impossibly high-strung and nearly hyperbolic, which makes Emily’s more gentle, accepting comedy seem all the more astounding; and the anger and sadness of Bossi’s fine, brassy Katie are the most raw, the least sublimated. Sulking about in contrast to all three of them is Stafford-Chenille (Sara Demos), Katie’s troubled, gothish daughter. It is an intricate and wrenching study of four evolving griefs, and when each of them opens a crack in the m.o. — when, for example, Carey finally shouts to Emily that “it’s not funny!” — both anguish and relief are palpable.
In the meantime, as Emily’s dreamlife becomes increasingly embroidered by Oxycontin, she starts coming to peace with a much more distant intimate, her own mother (Susan Turner, wonderfully sharp, solid, and no-nonsense). Long dead from cancer herself, and estranged from her daughter years before, the working-class housewife sweeps in with a busy broom and plenty of matter-of-fact wryness.
This strong cast carries the sense of having long been steeped together in Emily’s unique comic worldview; under Howard’s direction, their intimacy and common sensibility is richly convincing. At the same time, each is an individual drawn with exceptional clarity — this is no clan of cookie-cutter funny people. And in each of them exists a slightly different harmony or dissonance between the mirth and the weight of the human endeavor. It’s a collective chord that’s nicely sustained overall, even in the sound design (Kimball’s) — particularly as the first act ends with the Beatles’ punnily elegiac “Because.”
