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Published on 9/26/08
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While Dionysus (Pedro Pascal) and his wisecracking slave Xanthias (Derek Lucci) are tooling around the Underworld on a road trip to find a decent playwright (as one does), they stumble across one of Hell’s damned: poor, filicidal Tantalus. Crucified (“like an eeevil Jesus!”) on a tree for his sins, Tantalus once julienned his son and served him to the gods as stew. Deities remember stuff like that. Perhaps playwright David Greenspan, merrily pillaging Aristophanes’ Frogs, isn’t introducing Tantalus just so he can impale Dick Cheney on the same tree. Maybe Greenspan also wishes he could chop up his baby.
Old Comedy’s first half is what theatergoers sacrifice bulls and burn incense for: a dizzily intelligent, furiously hilarious political spoof. After intermission, however, the Aristophanic plot makes Greenspan stage a fight between Aeschylus and Euripides for the right to reincarnate, and whoosh!—the bottom drops out of the trireme.
For the questing half, Pascal (doing masterful comic work) and Lucci could be avatars for Greenspan and his hyperintelligent director David Herskovits. They volley ideas while snarking about pretension (“Did you just say ‘center’ with an ‘re’?” snits Xanthias). Greenspan is a titanic talent; like a vaudevillian Cronus, he swallows W.S. Gilbert and Bill Maher—and starts gnawing on Oscar Wilde. Herskovits has a clever no-frills style (a kazoo-accompanied chorus, for example), but he struggles to maintain thrust after the first half. Even the deflated second section (which crucially lacks Pascal and Lucci’s double-act) can’t make us forget the heady first one. Get out that Tantalusian cookbook: Chef has some cutting to do.
