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The Bald Diva Delicously Funny by Andy Propst
7/21/2003

David Koteles Bald Diva plays its final performance this evening. If you do not already have plans, rush to the Clemente Soto Velez Center to see what certainly ranks as one of the funniest plays to grace New Yorks stages in quite some time.

"Diva", which uses Ionescos theater of the absurd techniques to skewer contemporary gay life, takes audiences into the living room (designed with simple grace by Erik Flatmo) of Tim and Jim Jackson-Smith, lovers who mourn the fact that its 9pm and they do not dare leave the house until 11:15pm. Dryly portrayed by Tim Cusack (Tim) and Gerald Marsini (Jim), Jim bemoans televisions rerun schedule while Tim chatters on about contemporary gay life and their seasonal drinking patterns.

The ennui is soon broken by the arrival of another couple, Craig and Greg Tyler-Martin, guys who might be labeled "Chelsea gym boys" who are not too bright. While their hosts are changing, Craig and Greg (both Anthony DiModica and Terrence Michael McCrossan provide sensitively vapid portrayals) make confessions to each other. They have been unfaithful each having picked up someone in the steamroom of the gym the night before. What neither can understand is how they ended up in the apartment they share. A clue might be that the homes that they went to, respectively, look just like their own homes decorated like "a Pottery Barn catalog", but both are too dim to get it.

This is only one example of how Koteles skewers the cookie cutter reality that has become part of the gay experience. The playwright even gets his digs in at the similarities of "gay plays" introducing perhaps the funniest variation imaginable on the "party game" that seems to be the centerpiece of most works dealing with contemporary gay life.

Bald Diva does not rest with the gay experience, but broadens its canvas even while staying within the gay realm. When the scantily clad hunk must appear (because this is a gay play), its a fireman (a lust-inspiring Jamil Mena) who laments that his job is in danger because there arent enough fires to put out and that the Mayor is closing firehouses around the city. With this, Koteles deftly mocks the relatively short shelf-life of heroes in the city, even as firefighter calendars pervade.

Rounding out the crew of Bald Diva is Mary, the effeminate and wimpy house boy Jim and Tim keep. Matthew Pritchard has a grand time with this role, the works most absurd, and a terrific homage to Sabina from Thornton Wilders The Skin of Our Teeth. Kolteles turns the gay world entirely inside out with Mary, having her do not a typical torch song drag number, but a over-the-top hard rock piece while dressed like a poor mans Frank n Furter from Rocky.

All of the plays cleverness would be in vain were it not for Jason Jacobs shrewd direction which keeps the action whirling just on the edge of out-of-control. As the play moves toward its next production, one hopes that he and Jamee Freedus, who has worked on the piece as dramaturg, might convince Koteles to make a few brief cuts to the piece (a sequence in which the guys dont know what to say to one another runs a bit long as does an absurd discourse on whether theres someone at the door when the buzzer sounds).

These are only two short moments in which Bald Diva does not have the audience firmly in its merry corner, one that I would return to happily.

- Andy Propst