Yearning ’n’ yuks Beyond Therapy is thought-provoking fun BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Beyond Therapy By Christopher Durang. Directed by Dorisa Boggs. With Michael S. Templeton, Rhiannon McCullough, Britta Hallberg, Richard Wilbur, Timothy I. Kowalewski, and Zachary Gregus. At Roger Williams University’s Barn Summer Playhouse through July 17.

Admit it. Since the world has gone nuts, a little bit of neuroticism is a survival skill, and going bonkers may be a healthy adaptation process. Anyway, that was Christopher Durang’s premise in his 1981 comedy Beyond Therapy, and the argument stands up pretty well nowadays.

Especially if its wackiest characters are drawn as vividly as in the current production at Roger Williams University’s Barn Summer Playhouse. Half of the well-cast actors add a little crazed something extra that make the roles their own, and the others don’t get in the way of the laughs.

We get an impossible romance between a weepy bisexual lawyer and a woman who thinks men should cry only if something falls on them. We meet one therapist who is a prematurely ejaculating patient-seducer, and another whose co-therapist is a stuffed Snoopy. There is a jealous jilted gay lover and a waiter on perpetual coffee break. How dated, how modern.

The opening scene is one of those antic skits that would make a great 10-minute play, one you’d want to go on for another couple of hours. Fortunately, it does. Bruce (Michael S. Templeton) and Prudence (Rhiannon McCullough) meet in a restaurant on a personals date. Since playwright Durang (Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You) has the sort of absurdist sensibility in which having a comic character go over the top is not enough, he rigs another top on that for the bizarrely troubled Bruce to scale.

A few opening details will give you the idea. First Bruce says he hopes he’s not too macho for Prudence. Okay. But then he says that she has lovely breasts. "That’s the first thing I notice in a woman," he chirps. When Prudence recovers and says that she likes the cologne he is wearing, he thanks her and says that his male lover Bob (Timothy I. Kowalewski) gave it to him. And so on. Nothing exceeds like excess.

Durang’s quirk-packed humor works best — and it doesn’t succeed as well in all his plays — when recognizable human beings and human foibles stay in the foreground, with all the ridiculous madness like fireworks behind them. That happens here from the get-go, as Bruce’s and Prudence’s vulnerabilities become the real subject matter.

Prudence is a writer for People magazine, the perfect job for someone who has always dealt superficially with relationships. All men, she has found, are either crazy or dull. (She lived with a boring guy for a while, but in the end chose her cats — he was allergic to them — over him.) Prudence is so unsure of herself that she keeps going back to her therapist, Stuart (Richard Wilbur), even though he keeps trying to seduce her. He’s a terrible therapist and a worse lover — "Wanting sex to last a long time is sick!" he whines.

Bruce’s amiable and oblivious therapist, Charlotte, is likely the wackiest one ever written, and Britta Hallberg plays her with delight and arrested pre-adolescence. Charlotte has a way with words, a hilarious way: she often gets them wrong. When she can’t think of a word, such as "patient," she blurts a stream of free association: "Pony, Pekinese, parka, penis, no not that." (Not neglecting Freudian slips, Durang has her blurt "I like this erectness!" when Bruce’s boyfriend Bob is particularly forthcoming.)

As Bruce, Templeton combines an eager-to-please innocence with a knowingness that helps us distinguish a fool from a jerk. We wince along with Prudence at his foolishness, but Templeton never lets us dismiss the guy, no matter how many crying jags. It’s not so much that Bruce changes over the arc of the story, it’s that our sympathy for him increases.

McCullough, as the straight-forward Prudence, has less of an acting transformation to accomplish than Templeton does, but perhaps more of an acting challenge. With Bruce, through most of the play we’d be satisfied to just slap a knee occasionally, but with Prudence we have to constantly empathize with her plight. The character is our stand-in in this weird and troubled world, and McCullough seems to be asking all the questions, wordlessly, that we would in Prudence’s various plights.

The playwright makes clear from the outset, when he introduces the sentimental "Someone to Watch Over Me" as a kind of anthem for Bruce and Prudence, that he is out to explore yearning as well as provide yuks.

This is choice Durang, directed with swift assurance by Dorisa Boggs and acted ably. For summer entertainment, Beyond Therapy goes far beyond Neil Simon, into a place that makes us think and feel as well as laugh.