Star's PLAF Diary for Sunday, September 17th

As Jill mentioned, Fringe is officially over, but that didn't mean there wasn't time to fit one more show in; specifically When Boys Cry. Another work-in-progress (this time a study for a screenplay), When Boys Cry is billed as a "romantic comedy" - and although the play as I saw it (with part of Act II already removed, according to a sign in the lobby), I feel as though "romantic comedy" isn't a fair description. There is a love story in When Boys Cry - and the dialogue is funny, sometimes scathingly so. However, those two aspects of the play were incongruent enough so that they could have been in two separate shows.

The romantic first: The best, real, emotionally engaging moments of the play - the ones that deal with love, and life, and the ways we screw them up - occur between four main characters: pretty boy Fabrizio (Kelly Groves); Ethan Kane, one of Fabrizio's adopted fathers (Robert Bauer); Bradley, the artist in the dating slump; and Adeline (Anne Allen), his overprotective, over-involved Mother. The scenes where these character are thrown together, in almost any grouping, are the most interesting and moving parts of the play. (I even got a little misty-eyed there at the end, I'll admit it.) For me, however, they were too far and few between what made the bulk of the play:

The comedy: Playwright Rusty Dersch is no slouch when it comes to dialogue; every moment of When Boys Cry is absolutely filled to bursting with pointed remarks, witty repartee and Philadelphia-centric jokes that may or may not play well in other cities (yeah - sorry New Jersey). In fact, the script is so dense with laughs that there are some scenes that seemed to be in place not to move the story along at all, but rather to allow for extended periods of zingers and bon mots effusing from the characters' mouths. This excess of empty humor seemed strangely out-of-place in a play that seems to have so much to say about the "style-over-substance" frivolity of post-Stonewall gay culture. Funny, yes - but not in a way that is satisfying.

It is clear that When Boys Cry is still trying to find its center, which I hope will make more room for the "romantic" and perhaps spare some of the "comedy," as delightful as it was, for a different production.