Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Most Wanted’
A couple go on the run with their baby granddaughter.
Playwright Peter Sagal and director Louis Tyrrell have taken divergent paths since the two worked together in the late ’90s, first on Sagal’s “Denial” at the Pope Theatre in Manalapan in 1997, then on his play “What To Say” at the renamed (and now-defunct) Florida Stage in 1999.
Sagal is, as NPR fans know well, the host of the newsy and funny quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!,” which has an audience of 5 million listeners. Tyrrell is now running his second post-Florida Stage theater company, Theatre Lab, which performs in an intimate, 150-seat space on the Florida Atlantic University campus in Boca Raton.
The two have reunited for the world premiere of Sagal’s “Most Wanted,” a poignant comedy with heart, belly laughs and a subterranean strain of melancholy.
Though the play is set in 1999, as the country was on edge about the potential of a Y2K disaster, its real concerns are timeless. And that its long-delayed world premiere should be in Florida seems like destiny.
“Most Wanted” follows the misadventures of an older Jewish couple, Doris (Elizabeth Dimon) and Frank (Michael H. Small), as they’re on the run with their baby granddaughter, Jasmine. Upset because their testy daughter Isabel (Niki Fridh) decreed that they couldn’t see the baby more often than once every two weeks, Frank and Doris told busy “Izzy” they were taking her baby to the zoo, then left their home in Delaware to become senior-citizen desperadoes in the Sunshine State.
Rechristening the baby “Julia” to help cover their tracks, the couple also refrains from using credit cards, maintaining a barebones, cash-only existence in motels that even smell cheap. As they make their way toward Key West, they run into a wide variety of characters. Yet all the younger women remind them of Isabel, and a young cop looks just like Izzy’s soft-spoken WASP husband, Gerard (Matt Stabile).
Guilt and paranoia? Maybe so. But Sagal is also tapping into the confusion that can take root and grow as we age.
What makes “Most Wanted” not just entertaining but decidedly resonant are the truths woven into the script. The friction and resentments between Izzy and her parents will land differently if you’re a young adult or an older person, but they will land unless your childhood and/or child rearing were miraculously trouble-free. The challenges that come with aging, including illness and memory loss, also factor into a script that sometimes becomes comically surreal.
Just like Doris and Frank’s time on the lam, the run of this play is short. And as with these loving if misguided grandparents, “Most Wanted” is a touching, enlightening entertainment experience worth pursuing.
“Most Wanted” runs through Dec. 17 in Parliament Hall on the Florida Atlantic University Campus, 777 Glades Road, in Boca Raton. Show times are 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets cost $35. To order, call 561-297-6124 or go to FAUEvents.com.