Review: THE BIGOT play tries optimism as a strategy to crack intolerance

There are two apartments across the hall from each other in The Bigot. In the messy one on the right, Bill O'Reilly's book Killing Reagan is perched on the couch. Bottles of pills are sitting on a tray. On the left is a much neater, more modern home. Two young lesbians have just moved in after a brief courtship. They are celebrating their anniversary of two months, two days, six hours and twenty three minutes.

Jim (Stephen Payne) is a cantankerous old grump who is the character of the title. When his son Seth (Dana Watkins) comes by to check in on him, the Fox channel is blaring. Jim is currently going through dialysis and is having a rough time of it. No kidney matches have yet been identified. In the first scene, we learn that his son has not been tested for a match yet. Why not?

How is Jim a bigot? Oh, in the usual ways. "It's not a conspiracy theory if it's true?" In a debate about slavery, Jim offers that it was necessity of the time to advance commerce. Later he will touch on the Muslims and the Jews. Most of this character development is fairly generic stuff that we've now seen and heard many times before whether on stage or off.

The couple across the hall are health care workers having met in an emergency room. Paula (Jaimi Paige) is the romanticist, effusively optimistic and relentlessly kind. Aysha (Faiven Feshazion) is the practical, opinionated, organized half of this couple. Throughout the play they consult their watches and continue to count the minutes since they first met.

When Seth converses with his Dad's friendly neighbors, he asks if they might not mind looking in on him once in awhile. With the unrestrained glee of a woman striving for sainthood, Paula throws herself headfirst into the task. The bigot Jim has no time for lesbians and tells Seth, "those two carpet munchers get me so worked up." The bigotry is neither funny enough to be comedy nor seriously disturbing enough to be dramatically repulsive. Most of the jokes land with a thud.

From this set up, the plot careens from contrivance to contrivance. Can our lesbians crack the hardened shell of this bigot? Will father and son continue to bark at each other rather than heal their openly visible relationship wounds? Will a kidney transplant become available or will Dad die?

Each person in this cast works hard to create believable people with more than one or two dimensions. All of them are successful in that regard. The play's time period spans one month. The story arc and the character's progressions are forced and unbelievable. Gabi and Eva Mor have written this play from their personal experiences. They encountered discrimination. Like the character of Paula who is referred to as the "gay Mary Poppins," they remain hopeful for a better future.

Intolerance is perhaps the defining descriptor of the decade in which we live. The Bigot wants to shed a light on how we might be able to crack the code toward better communication and understanding. The plot twists here are too numerous and far-fetched. As a result, the play just muddles through as a mash up of Archie Bunker and an underwritten Lifetime movie.

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