Modern love

Brown's amorous Advice

by Bill Rodriguez

ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR. By Douglas Carter Beane. Directed by James Crawford. With Christina Nicosia, Jonathan Wolanske, McCaleb Burnett, and Adam Arian. At Brown Summer Theatre through July 11.

With any luck, a century from now Douglas Carter Beane's Advice from a Caterpillar won't make a lick of sense. Much ado about nothingness? Strutting and fretting about the non-existence of love? There were these tribes, incredulous children will then be told, who believed that relationships were just a matter of bargaining in a market economy.

The play takes on the tricky task of promoting Romantic love while not gagging us. It does so through the clever device of using our gag reflex against us -- showing how silly we look shrinking back in horror from such sustenance. But we're in the hands of the writer of the snippy hip, if glib, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, which puts us in dexterous hands indeed.

The quartet we meet are young and alert soldiers strolling the ramparts of Fortress Manhattan, guarding post-modern civilization from the drooling barbarians outside. (The barbarians being everyone unsophisticated enough to handle romance, not sterilizing it first in the furnace of scathing irony and caustic cynicism.)

In resolute post-modern tradition, they all appropriate rather than create. Missy (Christina Nicosia) is an artist who cuts and pastes snippets of her father's voluminous video history of her upbringing; she then supplies arch and dismissive commentary on such Memory Lane steppingstones as her birthdays. Missy keeps her love life as well as her past life safely remote by having a dull, but fun-loving, married man as her lover. We know him only as Suit (Jonathan Wolanske). As a banker he is the ultimate appropriator -- not creating wealth, only profiting from it. When she asks Suit if she makes him happy, he amiably replies, "No. But you distract me from being unhappy."

Missy's gay pal Spaz (McCaleb Burnett) is a performance artist who only does the intensely personal work of other performance artists. Of late, his catering business got really hot after his sarcastic response to a request for a fish course was to serve tuna casserole topped with potato chips. His current lover is a bisexual named Brat (Adam Arian), an actor who is currently unemployed. Brat says he would do Brecht for cab fare, loving that austere style of thoughtful theater drained of emotion.

In a stroke of worldly genius, Spaz suggests that Missy and Brat become recreational lovers. She would keep independent from Suit and bi-Brat would romp within the family. You can see where this is leading, can't you? Even before the Alice in Wonderland reference of the title comes up, we watch an unacknowledged en masse tumble down the rabbit hole.

But playwright Beane has hardly been revving in neutral, waiting for Missy and Brat to fall hard for each other so the story can take off. Our long process of getting acquainted with them and anticipating how they will react is good fun, under James Crawford's tight direction. That's especially so with this talented ensemble clicking together through the characters' changes like a theatrical Rubik's Cube. Burnett gives his stock Stage Queen character fresh life through intensity of presence and intelligent delivery. Nicosia makes Missy's self-delusion fully believable without rendering her soft-headed, so she charms sympathy from us. Arian wisely makes Brat a bit dense and draws responses from the heart rather than the head, making the character's Brecht fetish a touchingly ironic defense mechanism. As Suit, Wolanske could play the guy colder but, thankfully, doesn't. So instead of hissing at his presence, we get to shake our heads at a sap who sometimes glimpses his vulnerability.

A strength of the play is that it's not over when the True Lovers first recognize they're smitten, marking time till the curtain. As everything leading up to that point has shown us, there is plenty of baggage to jettison. That makes for a welcome longer trip and an entertaining view of obsolete notions smashing to smithereens in the wake of these painfully recognizable sophisticates.