Too-old boy meets girl in ‘Loves’
Rom-com deals in age inappropriate matches
“Loves and Hours” is a romantic comedy about middleaged dudes dating women half their age. Put that way, the new show at Fremont’s Broadway West Theatre Company might sound a little creepy and, indeed, some of the relationships in Stephen Metcalfe’s play are pretty uncomfortable.
The main character is Dan, a newly divorced guy around 50 years old, played by Jim Woodbury with wincing cynicism that gradually gives way to easygoing charm. The play opens at the wedding of his 49year-old best friend Harold (comically crass Mark Alan Flores) to 24-year-old Andrea (amusingly squeaky voiced Amanda Vogel), whom he’s pretty clearly marrying mainly because it makes him feel virile to be with an attractive young woman, not because of any particular interest in Andrea as a person. Harold tells Dan he’s got to get one of these younger women — these “hood ornaments of God,” as he puts it later in the play.
Harold’s conspicuously single sister Julia (nonchalant Alma Pasic-Tran) is also trying to set Dan up with someone. Her one attempt at matchmaking with a cripplingly anxious recent divorcee (a humorously awkward Vogel in an unconvincingly glistening wig) is a disaster. It’s pretty obvious where this is going, but it’ll take a few hours to get there.
In the meantime, despite his stated disinterest in dating, Dan somehow stumbles into a relationship with, yes, a much younger woman. While he’s being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, his auditor (confident, charismatic Gretta Hestenes Stimson) keeps flirting with him and finally just asks him out, because he can’t quite believe this young, beautiful woman could possibly be interested in him. Not only is she 25, half his age, but she was a friend of his daughter’s in high school, and a younger friend at that.
Dan’s perpetually peeved daughter, Rebecca (a prickly Casey Semple), is also dating a man in his 40s, which Dan’s not entirely comfortable about. And Rebecca hasn’t forgiven her mother (pleasantly matter-of-fact Deborah Murphy) for breaking up the family when she came out as a lesbian. Even Dan’s unambitious son, Dan Jr. (laid-back Justin Viz), is sleeping with an older woman that’s his childhood neighbor Sara (Tressa Kate Small, helplessly ogling the lad), who’s married to Tom (a boorish and oblivious Joel Butler), who’s always away on business.
The show is made up of many short scenes in a multitude of locations, with backgrounds dimly projected from behind a diaphanous screen that makes it conspicuous whenever actors walk across the backstage. Craig Cutting’s black-walled set is very spare, but even so, the many scene changes inevitably slow down director Jason Salazar’s otherwise well-paced production.
There are a couple of speeches in Metcalfe’s play (which premiered at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre in 2003) calling out middleaged guys’ obsession with younger women as kind of sad. Dan himself has occasional misgivings about it, as when Charlotte talks about admiring how supportive Dan was of Rebecca in high school and wishing she had a dad like him, or when the neighborhood kids assume he’s Charlotte’s dad. Still, he shrugs it off, because he’s far too turned on by having sex with someone much younger than to dwell on any disturbing aspects.
Ultimately, because this is a romantic comedy, the issues are shrugged off. The question is who’s going to end up with whom — and that’s not exactly hard to guess. For all the dubious gender politics on display, it’s a diverting, if overlong comedy, with a lot of funny bits along the way. Like most rom-coms, and indeed like most of the relationships in the play, it works best if you don’t think too much about it.