The LA Weekly Loves Us

Comedy is wonderful because it allows for a kind of Dadaistic theater-of-the-absurd freedom. This cornball, over-the-top play, The LA Weekly Loves Us, now at the Whitmore-Lindley Theatre and directed by David Jay Barry, gradually won me over through its pure absurdity. It’s a courtroom drama in which the audience is the jury and it’s a comic examination of what it’s like to be part of a small theater company in the Valley, plus it parodies classic plays and musicals. Wacky. Playwright Sy Rosen, a sitcom writer for shows like MASH, Taxi, The Wonder Years and Frasier, loads the play up with gags. There are so many that there’s something for everyone. It did feel quite zippily sitcom-ish, that is, full of situations driven primarily by jokes rather than by the dramatic content of the scene. But to complain about that in a play written by a sitcom writer is like criticizing a buffalo for being hairy and standing around a lot. Rosen loves comedy, and he’ll do anything for a good laugh or even a bad one. Oh, not a joke about a fat man who pines for Condi Rice and finds the gap in her teeth sex - yep, it’s there. The cast is really fun. One of the premises of the play - that actors do not play well with their fellow actors because they’re all too egocentric and ambitious- is beautifully realized. Simone Sullivan perfectly portrays the femme fatale actress who will do anything to get ahead. The courtroom team - Jason Ryan Lovitt as a lawyer defending the femme fatale who stabbed the artistic director to death with a pair of scissors, Bree Pavey as the prosecuting attorney, and Steve Hofvendahl as the judge - is great. I liked that part of the play best. The behind-the-scenes look at the agonies of struggling actors trying to make it in LA, yet being relegated to Valley theater, seemed less fresh, yet was still entertaining. The title of the play refers the idea that small theater groups in the Valley desperately long for rave reviews from the LA Weekly. If there’s a moral to this play, it’s that love goes awry when one is too desperate for the love of the big dogs. Forget the sleek Great Dane, oh broken-tailed mutts wearing eye patches - run with the pack!