Reviews: ‘The Siegel’ at City Lights.
Why would you do that?
The question comes up early and often in “The Siegel” at City Lights Theater Company in San Jose.
This new comedy, which premiered last year at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, is by Michael Mitnick, whose play “Spacebar: A Broadway Play by Kyle Sugarman” premiered at City Lights in 2013 and who (with Kim Rosenstock and Will Connolly) cowrote the musical “Fly by Night” that premiered at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in 2011.
The title is pronounced like the Anton Chekhov classic “The Seagull” — which was the inspiration for City Lights’ season opener, Aaron Posner’s adaptation “Stupid (Expletive) Bird” — but there’s nothing particularly Chekhovian about Mitnick’s comedy.
This play is about a guy named Siegel, Ethan Siegel to be exact, who decides out of the blue to ask Alice, the woman he was dating, to marry him. That is, he was dating her until they broke up two years ago, they haven’t spoken since then, and she lives with her new boyfriend whom she’s been dating pretty much ever since.
It’s a bafflingly bad idea, all the more so because Ethan pursues it with relentless enthusiasm and seems perplexed by any resistance he encounters. That makes Ethan, played with comical single-mindedness by Ben Euphrat, amusing to watch, but hard to empathize with, because his behavior is so hard to fathom. Again, why would you do that?
Erik Gandolfi and Luisa Sermol are particularly flummoxed as Alice’s parents, who keep up a charming steam of semi-combative banter. When amiable dad Ron starts to warm to Ethan anew, it almost seems like it’s just to give them something more to argue about.
Ella Dershowitz’s chirpy Alice is having none of it and just finds the situation exasperating. But Alice is feeling a little lost herself right now, blaming herself for the devastating loss of a presidential campaign she worked on.
Her boyfriend, Nelson, played with mellow equanimity by Davied Morales, makes a point of being cool with Ethan’s outrageous proposal and being friendly with him, which just vexes Alice more.
It’s hard to imagine anyone rooting for Ethan in this scenario, but with Alice in a vulnerable headspace there’s a certain temptation to holler “No!” when it seems like he might be wearing her down, as if she’s about to walk into a dark basement in a horror movie.
Laura Espino shows up very late in the play with an upbeat and impactful performance, but it’s hard to say much about that without giving too much away.
Two small living rooms — different, but not strongly contrasting — sit side by side in Ron Gasparinetti’s handsome set, with a city skyline beside them. George Psarras’ sound design enlivens the scene changes with a cross-genre selection of chipper pop music.
There’s a sitcom-like glibness about the quirky comedy. Everything’s played just a touch too goofy to suspend disbelief in the brisk staging directed by Mark Anderson Phillips. Like Ethan himself, the play feels like it’s trying too hard.
There’s a particularly infuriating moment, played as if it’s charming, in which Ethan says, “How can you fault me for being crazy when you’re the reason for it?” That’s the logic of domestic abusers, and worse. At a time when we’re seeing news stories implicitly blaming multiple mass shootings on a woman who rejected the shooter, there’s nothing cute about watching some dude blaming his astoundingly bad decisions on a woman.
Even if you see how the playwright is trying to explore the themes of relationship doubts and the possibly toxic concept of “the one” that someone’s destined to be with, there’s a twist at the end that makes one character finally cross over from deeply flawed to flat-out loathsome. It’s certainly an interesting ending, but it’s one that poisons pretty much everything that’s gone before.