Their very names conjure up vintage Neil Simon. But for all of their fussing and fighting, primping and playing, wooing and worrying, Felix and Doris aren’t merely just another odd couple.
They’re just plain odd.
Certainly playwright Bill Manhoff never envisioned his saucy-and-simpering pair as brought to life on stage by Actors’ Theatre of Washington. The bookish, neurotic owl and the sassy, brassy pussycat were first introduced to 1964 Broadway by the interracial coupling of Alan Alda and Diana Sands. Later the silver screen greeted Edward Lear’s far-fetched lovers in a psychedelic 1970 version featuring George Segal and a well-cast Barbra Streisand. But here, under the guidance of ATW staple Lee Mikeska Gardner, Felix and Doris are two gay men reaching out to one another in tumultuous late-’60s San Francisco.
It’s an interesting choice for a theater company that lives and dies by the interesting choice. The area’s only professional troupe singularly dedicated to the GLBT experience, ATW has a collaged history of productions that range from sexy spins on traditional scripts (consider their all-male retelling of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”) to outlandish evenings of transvestite indulgence (a hotter-than-hot “Rocky Horror Show” a few summers ago), to highlighting real queer theater (last season’s titillating production of Mamet’s “Boston Marriage”).
It works for the company to remain so unpredictable, and here Jeffrey Johnson and his ilk have crafted an exotic, celebratory journey through the core of what it means to be human.
If that notion sounds foreign to audiences already familiar with Manhoff’s wry comedy, then you’ll want to visit Source Theatre (before it closes for much-hyped renovations) and see the revelation for yourself. Sure, Manhoff’s clever humor is still served bone dry as it flops back and forth between moments of the absurd and the harsh realization of the bitter truth, but here his quirky, witty writing is matched by quirky, witty interpretations from Rick Hammerly and Johnson, whose dreamy Doris is a frilly but flimsy dragstress (her thighs rarely touch).
Still, Johnson is a groovalicious vision, all white go-go boots and splashy lingerie next to Hammerly’s pent-up Felix, a curious intellectual struggling to reason with his libido.
If Felix hadn’t been spying on Doris through his binoculars, then he wouldn’t have tattled on her for taking billsfrom gentleman callers. And if Doris weren’t thrown out of her place by her super because of Felix’s accusations, she wouldn’t bang down his door, threaten to crash on his couch, and fall in love overnight. But that’s the way of Manhoff’s threadbare plot, an episodic story of the unlikely love shared by two polar opposites who have more in common than what appears on the surface.
The evening wears on through awkward scene transitions and rough lighting plots, and Manhoff’s eleventh-hour attempt at profundity can all seem a bit overwrought, but Gardner’s savvy production aims its sights on the question of who we are inside, and through Hammerly’s superb delivery, the inquiry resonates like echoing calls from a wild owl.
‘The Owl and the Pussycat’
By Bill Manhoff
Through March 25
Director: Lee Mikeska Gardner
Venue: Actors’ Theatre of Washington, Source Theatre
1835 Fourteenth St. NW
Tickets: $25 to $30
Performances: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Info: 800-494-8497, atwdc.org
