Likable farce of 'Porn Shop' provides a guilty pleasure
A store is rich with dramatic prospects. Staff members' interactions echo with family dynamics, and every new customer brings a new scene. Whether the product is hamburgers, shoes, or sexual appliances, buying and selling is still the same procedure.
Anne Continelli makes great use of locale in her new, likable one-act farce, "The Last Little Porn Shop in Manhattan," which T&A Theatre Company debuts at the Boston Center for the Arts and will reprise at the Cambridge Family YWCA next month.The setting is a cozy little boutique with an unprintable name, located in Times Square just before gentrification.
Latex, lace, and leather dominate an inventory purveyed by two loyal clerks, Alice Green and Sky Abern. Above the shop, doddering-yet-randy octogenarian owners Ruth and Waldo Schoenfeld remain blissfully unaware of the imminent cleanup by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
Conflict builds when young Ed Schoenfeld, a self-professed geek and game-player, moves in to help out his grandparents -- and protect his inheritance. A side plot concerning a rabid gaming group, the "Slathering Slugs," puts him and the shop in further jeopardy. The staff comes up with an ingenious way to keep the X-rated products on the shelf.
Yes, we've come a bit of a distance since "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." Here, the creeps and fetishists who zip in and out of the shop are amusing grotesques and just as likely to be female as male. (And, aside from profanity and one revealing bondage outfit, explicit sexual content is absent.) Though aspects of the writing (too much reiterated expository dialogue) and acting (too much screaming) are amateurish, "Porn Shop" occasionally makes progressive points about sexism.
Granted, these are insincerely expressed by young Ed (delightfully played by Jeremy Wahlman). Part of his indoctrination involves regurgitating dogma about the danger of degrading images of women. The irony is that most of the female roles in "Porn Shop" are in the take-no-nonsense-from-weakling-guys category.
Most amusing is Katie Graycar. Her Alice is confident and assertive, tartly putting groveling customers in place by making wisecracks like, "I'm not your type -- I don't deflate and fold up into a knapsack." Jonathan Barron has style and charisma as Sky, a strapping androgyne in black leather platform boots. But why is the store, where most of the action takes place, situated at extreme stage right?
Despite the flaws, "The Last Little Porn Shop in Manhattan" is a watchable guilty pleasure.
The Last Little Porn Shop in Manhattan
Play written and directed
by Anne Continelli. Set, Heather Balchunas. Lights, Jeff Adelberg. Sound, Max Muehlen. Presented by T&A Theatre Company.
At: the BCA Plaza Theater, Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St., through Jan. 22, 617-933-8600; then at the Cambridge Family YMCA’s Durrell Hall, 820 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, Feb. 3-26, 866-811-4111.
