Courageous play wrings humor from unlikely setting: 9/11

By Joe Brown

Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Is it too soon?

That was the big question when plays and movies about AIDS began to appear.

A similar uncertainty also arose when artists started to circle the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as a subject.

“Nothing will ever be the same,” pundits told us as the nation reeled. They also announced that irony was dead.

Who was going to go there?

One of the first playwrights to dare approach the terrible topic was Craig Wright, whose “Recent Tragic Events” was first presented in 2002. Wright added more than a degree of difficulty by choosing to stretch his Pirandellian farce of ideas over the armature of a classic sitcom structure.

His dark comedy is a brave choice for Las Vegas Little Theatre, not necessarily because of the subject matter, but because it is such a delicate script to pull off. While addressing personal and collective dread and untangling philosophical snarls, it also has to be funny, a particularly difficult feat in the theater company’s 48-seat Black Box, where the performers are just a few feet from the audience.

It requires something close magic to pull it off, and I’m happy to say that director T.J. Larsen and his quintet of actors come through with subtlety and wit.

For a few minutes, the only light on the stage comes from a television silently playing CNN. It’s The Day After — Sept. 12, 2001. The only sound is a blow-dryer behind a nondescript apartment’s bathroom door.

Waverly, a Minneapolis ad exec, is frantically getting ready for a blind date. Her mystery date turns out to be bland Andrew, who runs a bookstore at the airport.

Heightening the ordinary tension surrounding a blind date is the fact that Waverly hasn’t heard from her twin sister, Wendy, who may or may not have recently taken a job at the World Trade Center.

The awkwardness is amped even higher by the uninvited arrival of Ron, Waverly’s down-the-hall neighbor, who immediately helps himself to the bottle of wine Andrew brought along, then invites his mysterious friend Nancy over for pizza.

And then Waverly’s aunt — who turns out to be the author Joyce Carol Oates — calls to say she’s in town, and she’s already in a cab headed for Waverly’s apartment.

High jinks ensue.

Actually, while the television ceaselessly, silently spins out the tragedy, the characters go about their business, trying to avoid talking about “the thing.” Their conversation — delivered, during an intricate drinking game, between shots and bites of pizza — touches on free will, whether America bears any blame for the attacks, whether we are actors or acted upon.

Mostly though, the characters — all of us, really — are waiting for the phone to ring: Waverly’s wall-mounted kitchen phone stands in for Chekhov’s famous third-act gun.

As Andrew, who gradually realizes coincidental connections to Waverly’s sister, Thomas Chrastka is the comedy’s straight man, called upon mostly to react with wide-eyed unease. But Chrastka gets a hilarious shining moment when Andrew tears through his date’s bookshelf, shouting out speedy synopses of Oates’ entire oeuvre. That’s because Waverly (Stacia Zinkevich, who wavers touchingly between control and barely suppressed panic) hasn’t read even one of her famously prolific aunt’s many books.

Wacky neighbor Ron gets the lion’s share of the laugh lines, and if Tony Foresta played him just a hair broader, he could easily steal the show — and throw the whole play out of balance in the process. But Foresta perfectly calibrates the off-center character, a hybrid of Jon Stewart and Kramer from “Seinfeld,” and his every non sequitur seems to emerge spontaneously.

Playwright Wright tricked out his script with gimmicks: A stage manager (Kira Greener) who is herself a scripted character introduces a “tone of chance,” which purportedly affects the outcome of the play.

The most effective of Wright’s playful effects is the dual role of Ron’s friend Nancy and Joyce Carol Oates. I’m not going to spoil it for you here, but it involves a stunt that goes from sight gag to ingenious comment, and it’s hard to think of any actor doing a better job with it than Candice E. McCallum does here.