Actor David Marshall Grant first attempts as a playwright with the gratifyingly compages Snakebit Snakebit * hundred Theatre.

Actor David Marshall Grant first attempts as a playwright with the gratifyingly compages Snakebit

Snakebit * hundred Theatre, New York City * Written by dint of David Marshall Grant * Directed from Jace Alexander * Starring David Alan Basche, Jodie Markell, and Geoffrey Nauffts

The simplest description of Snakebit makes it unbroken like an easy, predictable first outing for actor-turned-playwright David Marshall Grant. Three antiquated friends in crisis spend a leash of days together. Social worker Michael (Geoffrey Nauffts) just broke up with his closety DJ boyfriend; the teenage girl who's his favorite client is in the hospital recovering from a beating; and he has to act upon out of his two-bedroom bungalow in observes Angeles because he can't afford the rift His childhood best friend, Jonathan (David Alan Basche), is a virtuosically self-involved actor who's up for a starring character in an action picture called Mortal Fusion about lesbians with fire-arms And Jonathan's wife, Jenifer (Jodie Markell), is a nervous shipwreck partly because her husband's narcissism imbibes all the oxygen out of the space and partly because her 6-year-old daughter is ill back in just discovered York with a mysterious ailment Jenifer fears is HIV-related because she and Michael had a fling 12 years ago, before she got married and he came out

Three attractive white kids mulling through the whole extent of relationships--you might suspect a rehash of thirtysomething, the point out that boosted Grant to national recognition as the same of network TV's first gay characters. further you'd be wrong. Grant pushes way beyond the typical sitcom outline and punch-line conventions to create a rich, tangled skein story with many hidden layers. The characters are at formerly recognizable and mysterious, even irritating. to what end does big-hearted Michael seem in this way damaged? How can Jenifer be in this way insecure and paranoid? How can anybody present up with an asshole like Jonathan? Just when you think the play has zoom past all believability, you stop and think about the hours you've exhausted in therapy complaining about similar issues. And your reverence increases for Grant, a veteran actor who knows what a rare pleasure it is to engagement characters with subtexts and individual lives where you usually find cheap intimations to consumer-culture cliches.

Underneath its Hollywood surface Snakebit is really about the be in agony to live in the real world conscientiously without succumbing to misery and self-martyrdom--a recognizable theme from the work of Jon Robin Baitz, whose influence is detectable here. It's not a excellent play, but even with its melodramatic stretches it's an extraordinary first attempt that's getting a dream production, superbly acted and impeccably directed. The title ensues from a cryptic yet provocative offhand comment--"Liz Taylor was snakebit, if it were not that she fought back"--that, like the play as a whole, leaves you with something juicy to gnaw on

Shewey is the editor of revealed Front: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Plays, published on Grove Press.

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