Woolly's 'Comedy': Ho Ho! Who's Who?

By Peter Marks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 4, 2007

At one of the rollicking junctures of "She Stoops to Comedy," David Greenspan's busy meditation on love, sexual identity and the games theater people play, a tempestuous actress portrayed by Kate Eastwood Norris has it out with an old flame, a lighting designer played by . . . Kate Eastwood Norris.

Around a king-size bed onstage at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, Norris flings accusations and shoots wounded looks. At, er, Norris. Back and forth she goes, flipping from actress Jayne to designer Kay and well nigh nailing the illusion of a verbal brawl between two worthy opponents.

Illusion, after all, is what the theater is about. And in "She Stoops to Comedy," Greenspan, a veteran off-Broadway writer-performer, adds his own postmodernist ideas about how audiences are able to sustain two perspectives at once: how we lose ourselves in artifice and still recognize pretending for what it is.

It's robustly clever, even exhaustingly so. After the 10th or 11th scene that reminds us that it's only a play, however, the self-referential quality that gives the piece much of its vitality starts to go a bit stale. Even the nifty notion of writing in an encounter between two characters who are being played by the same actress -- in this case the splendid Norris -- loses its buoyancy because the scene is about twice as long as it needs to be.

Still, "She Stoops to Comedy" can be a tickling experience. An inside-baseball crowd is especially likely to respond to Greenspan's backstage badinage and all of the allusions to plays and players.

The dramatist, too, injects a lot of juiciness into his characters, and the Woolly cast, guided with vigor by director Howard Shalwitz, squeezes as much of it out of them as an audience might desire. Along with Norris's preening Jayne and plain-spoken Kay, we're happy to be in the company of such winning creations as Daniel Escobar's weary gay lonelyheart, Simon, and Michael Russotto's droll drama queen, Alexandra.

That last name is no typo. As "She Stoops to Comedy" incorporates bits of "As You Like It" -- and mimics the Shakespearean convention of female characters like Rosalind disguising themselves as men -- Greenspan requires that his female lead be played by a man. (This is also a riff on the Elizabethan requirement that all female roles be filled by men.) In "She Stoops," Alexandra poses as a man to audition for a role in a regional-theater production in which her ex-lover Alison (Gia Mora), whom she has not gotten over, has been cast as Rosalind. Confused yet? The play's two-way-mirror sensibility is established in the very first scene when Russotto, as a woman (in man's street clothes), mimes the process of transforming Alexandra into a man.

As if this role-blurring exercise weren't enough, Greenspan is forever revising the play in mid-scene, compelling characters to step outside the action and narrate the ever-changing versions of their stories. The ploys turn ever more in on themselves until you're no longer sure whether even the playwright knows what's going on. (Were Shakespeare's audiences ever thus tormented?) When one of the characters mumbles something about the making of a "pseudo-documentary about reality in the theater," you're getting a sense of the playwright's own sly attempts at brain-teasing.

"She Stoops to Comedy" is better at constructing this elaborate tease than resolving it. Unsurprisingly, the best moments are matters of individual inspiration: Norris, as Jayne, overreacting to the news that one of the stars of "As You Like It" has withdrawn; Escobar's Simon, delivering a soliloquy on the surfeit of problems of gay life that become fodder for theater; Russotto, deftly clinging to the pretense of a mannish man being a girly girl.

The irony of all this occurring on a bare stage, with a bed and an empty door frame -- the actors even mimic the creak of the door hinges -- is never lost. (The costume designer, Melanie Clark, contributes a pleasing wardrobe of hodgepodge urbanity.) In fact, despite the play's relentless gamesmanship, Shalwitz displays a light touch that brings out the best in "She Stoops to Comedy." Which is to say that even in overthinking a joke, there can be laughter.