Back with nuns Blazing
AFTER vanishing from the NY stage for 25 years, Albert Innaurato is back with a vengeance — and his weapons are cocked and loaded. Those who were around in the late ’70s remember him as the playwright whose “Gemini” ran on Broadway for 4 ½ years. But his new play, “Doubtless” — the last in a trio of oneacts in “Summer Shorts Series B” — is the antithesis of commercial. In fact, it had some theatergoers running for the exits.
In “Doubtless” — John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” is among the many targets here — a pair of sacrilegious nuns who are lovers act as Innaurato’s mouthpieces, spewing out a demented list of aphorisms and one-liners. Nobody’s safe as Innaurato sets his machine gun on automatic and fires nonstop at sexuality, religion and politics — a riff about Antonin Scalia and a salami at an Opus Dei orgy combines all three.
Pop culture isn’t safe either, with digs at Justin Bieber and, for good measure, the writer’s home base of Philadelphia, which he calls “the Tucks Medicated Wipes of cities.” The show deserves a better production than this one. It isn’t nearly outrageous enough and the acting’s stilted, though Dana Watkins occasionally rises to the occasion as Jesus, here a hunky vampire with a taste for Blondie.
“Doubtless” is too flailing, too rant-y to be good, but it will imprint itself on your brain with a red-hot poker.
The other two pieces in “Summer Shorts B” are much more straightforward.
In “The Mulberry Bush,” Neil LaBute sets up some neat little suspense on a park bench, as one man slowly exposes the other’s secret. The mind games are typical, if lesser, LaBute.
Opening the evening is Daniel Reitz’s poignant “Napoleon in Exile,” in which a mother (Henny Russell) plans for the future of her son (Will Dagger), who’s “on the spectrum” and ill-equipped to fend for himself. The two actors have a wonderful rapport, and you feel the awkward, but unconditional, love the characters share.
It’s a lovely piece, even if it does nothing to prepare you for the Innaurato onslaught to come.