Able Actors Can't Save a Limp Louie

Losing Louie, now showing at Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theater, is typical MTC fare, minus the rave-worthy quality: a fairly nimble, well-acted, nicely written dark comedy about dysfunctional family relations under absurd circumstances. But from one of the city's most prestigious production companies, one might expect better than an indecently smutty play that is neither distinctly good nor bad and about which there is frustratingly little to be said.

In both the plot's content and irritating complexity, the play feels like a sitcom that has outgrown both itself and the stage. It was 45 minutes into the first act before something of a mental diagram could be drawn to outline who was related to whom and who had slept with whom. Playwright Simon Mendes da Costa employs a useful storytelling technique, alternating scenes over a generational gap: the older story line serves to explain the context of the contemporary, but the technique becomes stale and overused before the first act has even ended. Ultimately, it's a ploy to make a fairly pedestrian plot more intriguing, but intention fails and the technique perpetuates confusion.

Crude sexual indiscretion in the early 1960s created a generation of emotional scars, infidelity, and strife. Louie (Scott Cohen), the recently deceased father of Reggie (Matthew Arkin) and Tony (Mark Linn-Baker), committed an adulterous act and saw through a domino-effect series of familial disasters until his death. Now his sons and their wives, two desperately estranged couples, gather for Louie's funeral at which nothing seems to go right, from a continuation of the family theme of sexual indiscretion to uncomfortable jokes to a flooded burial at a cake-vending funeral home.

The scenes set in the '60s serve to explain how Louie's sexual escapades left their lasting impact upon Tony, his oldest son, who was hidden under the bed during the play's opening scene, in which Louie and Bella (Jama Williamson), a student at his law firm, engage in a vaguely pornographic sequence. When Bella becomes pregnant, things quickly unravel, and the subsequent generation is still picking up the pieces over four decades later. In the alternating structure, the past is slowly explained. On stage, the transitions are fairly seamless and well-directed (as one set of characters exits, the other enters, with only one poignant crossover), but they are rather choppy textual transitions.

It may be easy to say that the talent of the cast is wasted on such crass, non-intellectual material, but if anything is redeeming about the play, save for its spotty moments of true laugh-out-loud comedy, it is several of the stellar acting performances, most notably that of Michele Pawk (Hollywood Arms, Chicago, Cabaret). As Tony's awkward, loud-mouthed wife, she is divinely hilarious and commanding, and singularly, the show's saving grace, if it can even be said to have one. Her co-stars do well enough with the work but ultimately do not shine, and it's certainly by no fault of their own, as all have admirable lists of credits to their names.

Ultimately, Losing Louie is a circuitous string of jokes-each trying to pick up the slack left by the last-woven in a too-complex, absurd family drama, a story not without potential, but done great disservice by style and surrounding content. It brings up too many themes-love, sex, marriage, death, loss, faith-and leaves them all at loose ends, focusing on none and resolving little.