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Douglas Carter Beane loves the unlovable—or at least he loves
writing about them. Con artists and movie agents (which is arguably
redundant) fascinate him as they work their chameleon wiles to suit
their mercenary needs. And when said chameleon is a female, Beane
has a field day parading them across the stage to exhibit their fits
of unabashed fawning and chronic scheming.
Beane’s latest play,
The Little Dog Laughed, has a Medusa at its center by the
name of Diane, who, against all odds, makes Beane’s previous
femme fatale, Alexa Vere de Vere from his 1997 play, As Bees
in Honey Drown, seem very nearly an amateur grifter.
Nonetheless, the two women could be related—or perhaps separated at
birth. A conniving movie agent, Diane is unforthcoming about her
past—with only one brief anecdote to explain her motivations (it
concerns sexism at the hands of a powerful producer). What matters
far more to Diane than from whence she has come is her overwhelming
need for fame and its attendant power.
In The Little Dog
Laughed, Diane has the job of keeping her client, Mitchell, in
the closet—given that any public acknowledgement of his
homosexuality would be, according to her, instant career death. And
though she alludes to being lesbian herself, Diane seems far less
interested in nestling with another person than with an Oscar for
Best Film. When Mitchell finds himself increasingly involved with a
New York hustler, Diane goes apoplectic. Not to worry, however, for
Beane has taken the pulse of the American populace and realizes that
what matters most in this society is a cover on a glossy
magazine—and at curtain’s end, Diane has her requisite happy
ending.
As
for the audience, we’re left with a sour taste—and the question as
to why we’ve spent the past two hours with such a heartless bunch of
hypocrites. The characters stalking the stage in Beane’s latest are
no more substantive than the public personae littering the pages of
far too many glossy magazines. If we needed further evidence of
Hollywood’s ruthless public relations machinations, a copy of
Vanity Fair would have sufficed—and we needn’t have dressed for
the theatre.
Best always,
Mark and Robert
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