June 01, 2007
WOOF! The Road Show
by Mark Sterner
From Cincinnati Fringe Review Blog
This anti-romantic gay romance will be enjoyed by straights and gays alike because it's not the typical boy-meets-boy tale and has some heft gained by an earnest treatment of why love often seems to go nowhere. Jerry Rabushka contributed book, music and lyrics to this musical play. He plays Jon as well. Zach Jett plays Adam and executes most of the singing and dancing.
Jon and Adam are stuck in rehearsal hell for a show that's touring somewhere but never seems to arrive. Jon is immediately head over heels for Adam, but Adam doesn't reciprocate, preferring the affections of the licentious stagehand Woody. In the opening number Adam sings, "I'll Never Say I Love You," and we're thinking, "Yeah, right, unless this is unlike every other musical we've ever seen."
At this point the WOOF! metaphor is delineated. At first I thought that gays were being compared to dogs in general, which wouldn't be politically correct, but later I understood that all men are like dogs in that they're attracted to whatever captures their attention. And there's a corollary: In relationships between two men, they rarely want each other when they're actually together in the same place at the same time.
So Jon and Adam go on rehearsing. The rehearsal scenes spill into real life, and vice versa, so that you can't always tell which is which. We do know that there is a kiss on page 19, so Jon always wants to rehearse that page. Unfortunately for Jon, however, it states in Adam's contract that he is forbidden to have sex with Jon. So the three of them go on in a No Exit kind of limbo, with nobody being truly satisfied.
Rabushka and Jett have a magnetic attraction onstage, even though the magnetism is often reversed. Jon isn't shy in declaring his love for the hunky Adam and uses as many ruses as he can think of to get him into bed. But Adam keeps coming up with different excuses. For example, if Woody is no longer an issue, then Adam reveals that he has personally been making pancakes from scratch for a certain scene in the show and Jon didn't even notice. How could this be love?
There is a very real no-win situation underneath the silliness, and the play occasionally underscores it. Most of this sentiment is expressed in the songs. Gay men have, for example, developed hardened skins to mask the hurt of early relationships. Too much love expressed too early in a relationship is repellent. Most see true love as a dream, an unreal, unattainable fantasy.
I mentioned the similarity of the play to Sartre's No Exit. I was also struck by some similarities to the Samuel Beckett's absurdist classic Waiting for Godot. Here we have two scruffy men (both have a good deal of facial hair) trapped in a situation they don't understand. They keep recycling lines such as "I really do love you" and "But I'm a professional, I have to honor my contract," and they keep jumping from reality to rehearsal in a way that's impossible to track.
Since Adam claims the play they're touring has been workshopped to death, maintaining that "Workshopping is changing hell," I am hesitant to suggest any changes. Nevertheless, I wasn't sure if the lack of clarity in the shifting between reality and rehearsals was intentional. If not, clearer blocking and transitions would set up the shifts. If lack of clarity was what was intended, this needs to be clarified as well, if you know what I mean. In any case, movement and timing should generally be cleaner and crisper.
There is enough artistic and intellectual substance, as well as pure entertainment value, to warrant a visit to this fringe production. Rabushka's songs energize the performance; the use of this medium gives it an extra dimension. Jett sings and moves well, using expansive gestures and facial expression.
