Chain gang NewGate serves Nicky Silver�s junk Food BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Nicky, Nicky, Nicky. When are you gonna accept that you�re not Christopher Durang and not bother writing till you have something to say?

At Bell Street Chapel, a resurrected NewGate Theatre is opening with Nicky Silver�s The Food Chain, and it�s no Pterodactyl, his scathing black comedy of 10 years ago. The earlier, breakout play turned a brutal eye on the human penchant for self-deception. This somewhat more recent take on our species� self-destructive habits forgoes bothering with insight into characters, however, leaving us with little more than affected Manhattan cynicism.

The characters trotted out are all quite self-involved but to varying degrees, from very much so to just short of � a new word is required � sociopathetic. In the world of Nicky Silver, though, to say someone is narcissistic is like saying someone bathes regularly. It�s expected. So a couple of the five people we meet seem, in this company, relatively normal. Such as the overbearing Bea.

Amanda Dolor (Nicole Gemma) calls a crisis hotline one night, just to have somebody to talk to. On duty is Bea Woodnick (Wendy Overly), who doesn�t believe for a minute that nothing is really wrong, as Amanda insists. The week before, after a casual 45-minute conversation, Bea was "betrayed" by a guy who then jumped out the window. Although Bea took the guy�s suicide as being mainly about her, she has ruefully learned that "people lie," so I guess the playwright does believe in the potential for human growth.

In the phone conversation, eventually Amanda admits that, well, there is a little problem. Her husband of three weeks has been missing for two weeks. He is a successful indie film screenwriter whom she had admired and bedded and impulsively wedded. He seems to have had second thoughts. She attributes his absence to his being a creative soul, obviously off working on some new screenplay. Being a trust fund-supported poet herself, Amanda has been stimulated enough by the stress to be "vomiting images like spoiled sushi," and thereby can accept his selfishness. After all, her former boyfriend self-immolated himself on stage in a performance piece, so this isn�t so bad.

Hubby Ford Dolor (Steven Wroblewski) doesn�t have much to say about all of this. In fact, he doesn�t have any lines. The Dolors are, after all, too tr�s-tr�s moderne to be dolorous, which my dictionary defines as "exhibiting sorrow, grief, or pain." Maybe The Food Chain could work if there were some tension created between their wanting to appear cool but visibly suppressing their seething within.

But in this production they come across pretty much as ciphers, the husband a blank-faced simpleton and the wife doing spoiled brat turns. The only dimension Silver gives Amanda is her whining repeatedly about the plight of women, oppressed by the patriarchal culture, not permitted to have bad skin and having to carry purses lest pockets make their hips bulge. That�s all well and good, as recurring rants go, but we�re hearing the playwright rather than a character who manifests those concerns in any other ways. (That�s not to say Silver doesn�t entertain us with his displaced harangues: it�s a hoot to hear Amanda complain that she doesn�t want to get a dowager�s hump in old age because then all her hems will hang lower in the front.)

Overly does a great job as Bea, the hotline lady, who later shows up at Amanda�s apartment, pissed off because she was hung up on. Bea points out to Amanda that while men may rule the world, penises rule men, and guess who rule penises? Overly pumps scads of personality into the woman, so we�re laughing even between the one-liners.

Eventually we meet Serge Stubin (Joe Ouellette), a preening runway model awaiting a call from Ford, his latest lover. But the person who shows up is Otto Woodnick (yes, Bea�s baby boy). Joe Mecca does a nice balancing act with Otto, making him desperate but not pathetic as a recently fired stand-up comic. Otto has a crush on Serge, whom he dated briefly four years before. Unrequited love has turned Otto into a snack food addict, constantly noshing from a shopping bag. His idea of a diet is to chug a can of Slim-Fast with a meal.

Clearly Silver is appalled at the lack of character his characters reveal � Serge had a boyfriend going in for heart surgery when he met Ford, but 14 days of non-stop sex distracted him from even sending flowers. However, putting down these two-dimensional people is tediously easy. It�s like pushing over a propped-up building fa�ade and making a muscle. As Toy Story and better Nicky Silver plays demonstrate, even cartoon characters are funnier when given some depth.