The three young women staggering through a fateful night on the town in Adam Bock’s flimsy but sweet comedy “The Drunken City” are the kind that some of us would pay a king’s ransom not to be seated near in a Manhattan restaurant.
If you’ve dined out in the meatpacking district, you will be familiar with the species. Dressed in shiny tops and skinny jeans, clinging tenuously to their equilibrium in Jimmy Choo knockoffs, they gather in groups — always in groups! — to guzzle luridly colored cocktails, to giggle and screech their way through a few rounds of appetizers before clattering off to a night in the clubs, gaudy purses dangling from manicured hands. (Lest I be accused of latent — or blatant — misogyny, let it be known that I’d also pay a king’s ransom not to be seated next to a table of bloviating, Maker’s Mark-swilling investment bankers.)
Mr. Bock, author of the creepy comedy “The Receptionist,” has some affection for these dizzy but harmless young things. Although “The Drunken City,” which opened Wednesday night at Playwrights Horizons, pokes gleeful fun at their insipid conversational tics, messy mating habits and inability to hold their liquor, Mr. Bock also strives to reveal the lonely hearts hidden beneath the loopy exteriors.
Set primarily during a single evening, “The Drunken City” is a variation on the familiar pre-wedding-jitters story, a subgenre of romantic comedy rooted in Shakespeare, and one that has proved durably popular in any number of movies, from classics like “The Philadelphia Story” (a play before it was a movie, of course) to subclassics like “Runaway Bride.”
Marnie (Cassie Beck), soon to be a bride, and her soon-to-be bridesmaids Melissa (Maria Dizzia) and Linda (Sue Jean Kim) have hit the city for a final bachelorettes’ night out. In front of a club, after several syrupy drinks, they stumble into conversation with Frank (Mike Colter) and his buddy Eddie (Barrett Foa), also out for a good time and, like the girls, seriously inebriated.
It turns out they all come from the same town — a coincidence that naturally takes on cosmic significance, as uninteresting coincidences have a remarkable way of doing after you’ve had several drinks. Soon Marnie and Frank, who is still smarting from a painful breakup, have locked lips and wandered off to pursue their relationship further. The appalled Melissa follows, hoping to wake Marnie up to the lunacy of betraying her betrothed — who happens to be a guy Melissa once dated.
Dragged along to help break up the party are Eddie, who has no interest in girls and would be happy to let Frank have his fun, and Linda, whose previous musings on the devouring dangers of the city strike a portentous note that is often a hallmark of Mr. Bock’s work. (“The city’s like a monster, like a sleeping dragon or some dark creature in the night that cracks open an eye,” she says, “and whispers dark dangerous dark ideas into your ear.”)
Directed with pleasing dispatch by Trip Cullman, “The Drunken City” is embellished with several stylistic adornments of a similar, modestly experimental variety. The set by David Korins is a slab of gray sidewalk that, at certain junctures, suddenly tilts up and down, tossing the characters about as if they’d fallen into a cocktail shaker. Later Ms. Kim sings a brief, deadpan snatch of song, also about the scary city, that sounds familiar to anyone who’s seen a Richard Maxwell opus.
But these surrealist touches cannot really disguise the fundamentally conventional — at times trite — nature of the play. “The Drunken City” is novel in its focus on characters more likely to be found in throwaway sitcoms than on the stage, but its plot is not especially interesting. It is hardly a stunner to learn that while Marnie loves her fiancé, the unseen Gary, she isn’t (sigh) “in love” with him. A romantic subplot involving Eddie and Bob (Alfredo Narciso), the owner of the bakery where the girls all work, proves primarily that the play does not have anything particularly revelatory to say about the bruising search for love among gay men either.
Still, the cast is fresh and appealing. Ms. Dizzia, such a charmer in Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” nails Melissa’s prissy self-righteousness with a jutting hip and a disbelieving wag of the head. Ms. Kim performs a physically inspired study in the dislocations of drunkenness.
Ms. Beck, making her New York debut, brings an understated sweetness to her role as Marnie, whose inebriation gradually subsides as she discloses the real dissatisfaction fueling the evening’s folly. Mr. Foa invests Eddie with a quirky charm, although it could be argued that more quirky charm is the last thing this whimsically conceived character, a dentist who happens to tap-dance, really needs.
At just 80 minutes, “The Drunken City” is reasonably diverting without overstaying its welcome. The characters sober up for a final scene in which the romantic entanglements are brought to a hopeful if hung-over conclusion. This is just as well, for as the more richly drawn Conor McPherson play “The Seafarer” similarly proved on Broadway this season, the spectacle of other people’s drunkenness does not have unlimited appeal. However piercingly or comically drawn the booze-sodden may be onstage, after a while in their company you are either bored, or thirsty, or both.
THE DRUNKEN CITY
By Adam Bock; directed by Trip Cullman; sets by David Korins; costumes by Jenny Mannis; lighting by Matthew Richards; sound by Bart Fasbender; music by Michael Friedman; choreography by John Carrafa. Presented by Playwrights Horizons, Tim Sanford, artistic director. At the Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 279-4200. Through April 20. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
WITH: Cassie Beck (Marnie), Mike Colter (Frank), Maria Dizzia (Melissa), Barrett Foa (Eddie), Sue Jean Kim (Linda) and Alfredo Narciso (Bob).
