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Miserable With an Ocean View
Reviewed by Neal Weaver
Whitefire Theatre
Through September 26
RECOMMENDED:
Howard Skora’s black farce is constructed like a TV sitcom, but it’s snarkier, darker, gayer, zanier, more surreal, more outrageous — and certainly funnier — than most television fare. Jeff (Paul Elia) is a gay man living in San Francisco. He’s summoned home to Long Island by his sister Judy (Elizabeth Regen) to help care for their invalid mother (Patty McCormack), who has survived two bouts with cancer, several strokes, and various other ailments. Now she’s wheelchair-bound and unable to speak, except via messages scribbled on a miniature blackboard. But that doesn’t prevent her from being hell-on-wheels.
Jeff soon discovers that Judy has assigned him to a guest-room made from a former closet, which she has hideously decorated. He sees this as one more attempt by his homophobic family to push him back in the closet. Judy is constantly asserting that hers is a perfect marriage, but secretly she’s sex-starved and miserable because she hasn’t had sex with her husband in 14 years.
Jeff pretends that he’s a successful internet entrepreneur, but in fact his life is falling apart. His business has failed, his lover has dumped him, and he’s maxed-out all seven of his credit cards to the tune of $200,000. Now he’s determined to finally tell his mother that he’s gay. But his attempt to have a television “moment” with Mom ends with in physical violence.
The fourth member of the family is brother Ray (Alex Skuby), an insurance broker and obsessive body-builder and cross-trainer, who’s in the middle of a messy divorce and regards Jeff with scorn. (His problem is that their mother never loved him because he failed to realize her ambition that he become a world-class oboist.)
Things really get complicated when the grotesque clown-doll (Drew Droege), Judy has chosen to ornament his closet, starts talking to Jeff, and eventually comes to life, psychoanalyzing him and giving him advice—and alternately trying to seduce him.
The whole family is addicted to lying, passing judgement on each other, and stewing in their own comic desperation, leading to much comic mayhem. Jeff gives some of his “boner” pills to Judy to awaken her husband’s dormant libido, with disastrous results. And it all culminates in a wildly unorthodox happy ending.
Director Jim Fall matches Skora’s knack for screw-ball comedy with an equally deft touch. And the cast plays its loony characters with zest.
Elia finds a wistful, fatalistic charm in the loser Jeff, and Regen makes mugging a fine art as his perpetually anguished/exasperated sister. Droege’s Clown is campy, simpering, and determined, and Skuby’s Ray is very funny, despite a rather too close similarity to the character of brother Robert on Everybody Loves Raymond.
Patty McCormack first gained fame as the diabolical child from hell in the original Broadway production of The Bad Seed, and now, after a long and busy seven-decade career, she has graduated to playing the diabolical mother from hell, with a monstrous Phyllis Diller-ish performance. She somehow wins our sympathy, despite her obnoxious treatment of her children, because they so richly deserve it.
Curiously, this is the only show in living memory to proclaim “no nudity.”
Whitefire Theatre, 13500 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks. Adults only. Sat., 8 p.m.; thru September 26. (800) 838-3006, https://miserable.brownpapertickets.com
