Playwright: Matt Tassell. At: Second Thought Theatre Company at Stage 773, 1225 W. Belmont Ave. Tickets: 773-327-5252; Article Link Here ; $25. Runs through: May 4
History records many instances of gay men and het women enjoying long and affectionate friendships, while romantic literature abounds in deathbed confessions of hitherto suppressed devotion—and where would classical tragedy be without innocent lives thwarted by lies born of desperation?
All these themes grant precedent to Matt Tassell's tale of Eddie and Stella, close comrades since their troubled youth, now grown to adulthood. When the former helps the latter move into the apartment she will share with Adam, the two gay men are immediately smitten with one another, making for household tensions as the roommates chafe under Eddie's loyalty to them both. Then one night, after Stella has been dispatched on a blind date, Eddie learns that his girl-pal is dying of cancer—a revelation that plummets him into a seize-the-day frenzy spurring him to propose marriage to Adam and initiate carnal consummation with Stella. Intermission.
An intermission in a 90-minute one-set production is not just a bar-and-bathroom break, though—it also serves as a dramatic pause, strategically placed to allow us a moment to mull over what we have witnessed and examine it for possible clues to what is to transpire later. This gives us an advantage over the play's characters, who don't have the luxury of detachment, however abbreviated, and thus are thrown into confusion at the discovery that they are the victims of a Macchiavellian hoax permissible in a Regency romp, but unforgivably repugnant in a realistic context.
Adam Benjamin directs a cast that navigates the deliberately ambivalent tone of Tassell's text with unwavering conviction and irresistible charm right up to the unsatisfying denouement, for which we should have been prepared by Eddie's earlier assertion that life doesn't always offer the kind of tidy closure that you find in fiction. So we can't say we weren't warned, but by the time the ax falls, we are so emotionally invested in Matt Messina's, Daniella Collucci's and Patrick Belics' piteously vulnerable young lovers—we can even sympathize with their airheaded het sidekick Stan, played by Joseph Galizia—that we depart the theater in hopeful anticipation of a possible reconciliation, once the alarums and excursions subside and the devastated comrades can discuss the situation from the rational perspective granted us by our brief respite from the shock of immediate confrontation.
