Review - Love Child: (Off-Off) Broadway Baby

Opening night isn't exactly going smoothly for the Off-Off Broadway production of Love Child, a modern adaptation of the infrequently performed Euripides drama Ion, presented at the Sausage King Space in Red Hook. A noisy audience member in the front row can't silence her cell phone and hearing aid, an actor has passed out on stage, an upstaging diva is trying to steal the show and a large grease stain on the floor makes each entrance and exit a death-defying experience. But on opening night of Love Child, Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton's two-man comedy presented by Primary Stages, everything was crackling with hilarious split-second precision.

This is another one of those ventures where a minimal number of actors (two) take on a maximum number of characters (I lost count), quickly ping-ponging back and forth from scene to scene and persona to persona. Such evenings can sometimes seem more like athletic events than theatre and while a great deal of the enjoyment of Love Child comes from watching how quickly the writer/performers, directed by Carl Forsman, can snap into fully realized characterizations of various genders, ages and ethnicities (vocally supplying every sound effect, even) without any costume changes, there is also a sweet, little story to warm the heart a bit.

Performed on the camouflaged set of the company's current production of A Body of Water, the ninety-minute yuk-fest opens with a likable lad named Joel (Jenkins) telling us about his childhood fascination with the stories of Greek tragedy, which he would dramatize for fun with homemade sock puppets. An unfortunate washing machine incident put an end to that. But soon we're peeking inside the ladies room of a small performance space in back of a Brooklyn sausage restaurant where Joel's mother/agent Kay (Stanton) and her eccentric friend Ethel (Jenkins), who can't help getting emotionally (and loudly) caught up in any theatrical event she attends, are preparing for the evening's entertainment. While the two ladies take care of business in their separate stalls (it's actually very funny without getting tasteless) we find out there's a TV producer in the audience who's considering casting Joel in a sitcom pilot.

The fellas do a remarkable job of replicating the chaos of a crowded dressing room just before curtain, carrying on numerous simultaneous conversations which crisply bring to life a stage full of contrasting characters. Naturally, as always happens in these cases, the opening night performance looks like a disaster, but as real life begins to parallel the convoluted Greek drama involving the god Apollo, the Oracle at Delphi and a child of questionable parentage, a happy ending seems inevitable.

Of course, you're excused from even realizing there's a plot going on if you're too busy being convulsed by Jenkins and Stanton's loony antics. The real story of Love Child is the superior clowning, detailed acting and expert teamwork on display.

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