Brides-To-Be on a Bar Crawl

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The New York Sun

Surely you’ve been in an improbably heartfelt conversation with someone who’s had too much to drink. Their arm or neck or knee begins to sag mid-sentence, as if the effort to maintain the posture of sobriety proves too daunting, and they try to mask it by modifying the sodden dip into an oddly timed bit of body language: an abrupt scratch of the head, say, or maybe a small and oddly graceful dance step.

A similar rubber-limbed delicacy hovers over Adam Bock’s “The Drunken City,” in which all but one of the six characters — three brides-to-be on a bar crawl and the guys they encounter — slide fairly deep into their cups. Mr. Bock consistently dodges the “in vino veritas” cliché, wherein people inevitably bare their truest, deepest selves once their protective layers have been washed away. His characters are no less earnest or cagey or skittish than usual; it’s just that each of these aspects sprouts up a bit more impulsively, which makes for bad decisions but good theater.

Director Trip Cullman introduces the three women practically in mid-shriek, as the wary Melissa (Maria Dizzia), the excitable Linda (Sue Jean Kim, the most impressive of the strong trio), and the hyper-organized Marnie (Cassie Beck) display their engagement rings to the audience in giddy unison. Fissures quickly become apparent, though, as the women compare notes and admit to feelings of envy and unease. Melissa used to date Marnie’s beau. One of the proposals was accepted accidentally. (“I think maybe I was thinking about something else.”) And once the screams die down, all three pairings appear to have serious blemishes.

These flaws come to the surface during Marnie’s bachelorette party in the (unnamed) big city, where they cross paths with a pair of comparably soused men. There’s Eddie (Barrett Foa), a dentist with a penchant for tap-dancing, and Frank (an endearing Mike Colter), a sensitive sad sack who’s still licking his wounds from a relationship that ended a year ago. Marnie catches Frank’s eye, and typical bachelorette-party shenanigans subtly shift into something a bit more torrid and potentially treacherous. As the new couple repeatedly runs off, and the remaining group enlists the help of Marnie’s friend Bob (Alfredo Narciso), all six men and women begin to rethink what they seek from their potential life partners and whether they have any business expecting any better.

Mr. Bock’s last two plays, “The Thugs” and “The Receptionist,” each used this sort of young-love melodrama as a counterweight to the ill-defined but unshakably grisly events occurring just offstage. And Linda, seemingly the flakiest of the three brides-to-be, carves out space for a similar shift in tone early in “The Drunken City” when she describes the dangerous allure held by the site of their soggy wanderings:

“The city’s like a monster. Like a sleeping dragon or some dark creature in the night that cracks open an eye, it just stares at you and dares you to come closer to it, to look down its dark streets, says ‘Come here’ and whispers dark dangerous dark ideas into your ear. It’s fun.”

And that’s the weird and rather delightful thing about “The Drunken City”: It is a lot of fun, and not in a chortling, gallows-humor sense. Characters in the middle of intense discussions about love and responsibility stop dead in their tracks, not so much to process these deep thoughts as to rack their pickled brains for the name of their new soul mate. Mr. Cullman pitches the performances at just the right level of wooziness: You can practically see the Breathalyzer numbers float up and then back down. (Mr. Foa’s intelligibility is just one of many fine examples.) And when that dark creature does finally awaken, it’s menacing but also instructive — a reminder that the right to behave selfishly, even monstrously, is a crucial and not necessarily unwelcome component of growing up.

The ground literally gives way underneath the revelers from time to time, an overly literal device that marks a rare lapse on the parts of Messrs. Bock and Cullman and of their resourceful set designer, David Korins. As often occurs with drunkards, the occasional conversation drags on a bit, and not every pairing feels plausible even within the context of Mr. Bock’s fanciful setup. For one thing, how often do straight and (ostensibly semi-closeted) gay men go on the prowl together?

But even when the specifics ring false, Mr. Bock’s deeper lessons have a scrappy resonance. “She only lied to me because I never listened to her. That’s what she told me when I finally listened to her.” That’s how Frank describes his last disastrous romance, a dynamic that many people, sober or otherwise, will surely recognize. The thick tongues and scattered thoughts of his tipsy sextet in “The Drunken City” never keep Mr. Bock from listening to them with the scalpel-sharp insight that has made him such a potent force on today’s theater scene. The result is tart and smart and, well, intoxicating.

Until April 20 (416 W. 42nd St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-279-4200).


The New York Sun

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