Who, exactly, is getting punched below the belt in Below the
Belt? The title suggests a sudden, painful revelation, and this
stark comedy about three office drones, working in a postapocalyptic
factory that churns out an unspecified something, has been compared to
both Samuel Beckett and The Office (at least in ACT Theatre’s
press materials). That’s overstating the case.
Both Beckett and Ricky Gervais come to their audiences as cryptic,
gloomy prophets. They speak of universal stupidity through individual
clowns (Didi, Gogo, David Brent) and issue warnings disguised as
jokes—they have something urgent to tell us about our miserable
selves. Below the Belt‘s playwright, Richard Dresser, on the
other hand, is just goofing around with three dopes. He roughs up his
characters (the boss is a paranoid sadist, the new guy is a gull, the
old-timer is cranky but duped), but not us. We can relax and enjoy the
show. Dresser isn’t ambitious enough to implicate us in his characters’
hells.
Which isn’t to say Below the Belt is a failure. Dresser’s
1995 script is zingy and restless, like old 1950s radio routines, a
ménage-à-toil where the boys passively/aggressively
bruise each other’s egos for our amusement. Actors John Procaccino (the
boss), R. Hamilton Wright (the credulous newbie), and Judd Hirsch (the
cranky old-timer) are just the men for the job: three old hands who
know their way around a stage and a punch line. And the punch lines are
dark. Take this exchange, between the new-timer Dobbitt (Wright) and
the old-timer Hanrahan (Hirsch):
DOBBITT: Alright, Hanrahan. What have you got against me?
HANRAHAN: You’re alive on this planet at the same time as I am.
DOBBITT: People have always liked me.
HANRAHAN: People also like chocolate bunnies and plastic flowers and
warm baths. Being liked is no great achievement.
No, it isn’t. Below the Belt is likable, but it’s a passing,
grumpy fancy. It won’t stick in your mind for long.
“I f most things aren’t funny,” Murray Burns cries to his brother in
a rare moment of unalloyed sincerity, “then they’re only exactly what
they are; then it’s just one long dental appointment interrupted
occasionally by something exciting, like waiting or falling
asleep.”
The charming and eccentric creation of writer Herb Gardner, A
Thousand Clown‘s Murray Burns is the anti-nebbish. He lives in a
one-room apartment occupied by himself, his records, his eagle statues,
his ukuleles, his records and radios and clocks, his fierce pride, his
sly sense of humor, and his libido. Only two things in the apartment
aren’t his: a pair of
ladies’ gloves (left over from last night)
and his sister’s son—a sparklingly intelligent 12-year-old named
Nick, whose mother abandoned him in Murray’s apartment seven years
ago.
Murray is a midcentury New York bachelor-hero. (Gardner wrote the
script in 1962, and based Murray on Jean Shepherd, who wrote and
narrated A Christmas Story.) Murray quit his job writing TV
comedy, goes to movies in the middle of the day, likes his martinis
with onions, runs little social experiments (such as apologizing to
everybody on a New York City street), and is smarter and mouthier than
you, and knows it. In 1962, to a generation raised on Jack Kerouac and
Lenny Bruce, and before Woody Allen popularized Jewish-nerd chic,
Murray Burns would’ve been the height of cool. He’s a more familiar
creature today—just another alternadad who wants to have his kid
and eat his pot brownies, too.
But this was then, and when little Nick says untoward things in his
special school for the precocious and gifted—”There was this
composition I wrote in creative writing about the advantages of
unemployment insurance,” he says to his uncle in a tough New York
drawl, “it turned out they’re very square up at the Revere
school”—two inspectors from the child-welfare board come calling.
Murray flirts with the lady half of the team and draws the wrath of her
partner, who delivers an ultimatum: Either Murray starts behaving like
other grown-ups (suit, job) or Nick’s off to the foster-care
system.
The world wants Murray to straighten up and fly right, but Murray
can’t help wisecracking his way through the process. We can see major
plot turns from miles away, but Gardner’s dialogue buzzes with the
clever energy of the mid 20th century—the prototype for Below
the Belt. (Murray: “You better go to your room.” Nick: “This is a
one-room apartment.” Murray: “Oh. Then go to your alcove.”) The
actors—especially Matthew Boston, who plays Murray with a rangy,
loose-limbed confidence, and Nick Robinson as little Nick—splash
through the play like kids in a pool. It’s clear they’re having a grand
old time.
The only sour notes come toward the end, when Murray can’t decide
between his nephew and his independence, and his selfishness shows
through. Director Sari Ketter doesn’t quite master the trick of his
(inevitable) compromise, which feels like neither a triumphant embrace
of grown-up responsibility nor a rueful farewell to jaunty
bachelorhood. It just sort of sits there—the only flat moment in
an otherwise sweet old comedy.
It’s a marvel that, after the worldwide success of The Vagina
Monologues, almost a decade passed before somebody thought up My
First Time. The premise is similar: a few actors on bar stools,
telling other people’s true stories about sex. The show is a producer’s
dream: no sets, few actors, and unimpeachably entertaining material.
(Plus, My First Time doubles Vagina‘s target audience.)
New York producer Ken Davenport put it together in 2007 and now has
versions running in Korea, Italy, Mexico, and elsewhere.
The stories have been culled from entries on the website www.myfirsttime.com, and range from
the spectacular (a 14-year-old boy losing his virginity to a
35-year-old tranny at Yellowstone National Park) to the all-too-mundane
(a handjob in a movie theater from a “fat and not very attractive”
friend) to the so-tragic-it’s-almost-Greek (a teenage girl making love
to her cancer-ridden brother because he doesn’t want to die a virgin).
The four actors in this production are a little hammy, but it hardly
matters. Sex sells itself. 
