Review - Straight Up With A Twist: The Heterosexuality That Dare Not Speak Its Name

How's this for weird... On Sunday night I saw a show where a straight guy spoke for an hour and fifteen minutes about how people mistake him for gay because of his interests and not once did he mention anything about musical theatre. Not once! If nothing else, I give Paul Stroili points for not using the most obvious cliché.

And I also give him and his solo show, Straight Up With A Twist, points for coming up with a handy new label, "Renaissance Geek," which he uses to describe "the botched attempt to romanticize the straight male." Botched because nature's attempt to create a male who can attract a female with his sensitivity, taste in fashion and knowledge of fine wine has resulted in the kind of guy who is offered permanent residence in the friend zone while brutish, sports-obsessed, artistically inept males are favored for dating and procreation.

And though Stroili is in fact happily married to a woman who says he's like a gay friend she can have sex with, he calls himself (and me too, despite my interest in sports) one of the "men who know the wrong things."

After a brief introduction which brings up historical examples proving that Renaissance Geeks date back to the caveman era (they were the cavemen who know that you could drag a woman by her hair easier if it was in a French braid) Straight Up With A Twist (directed by Bill Penton) becomes primarily a collection of brief monologues about Paul told by those who knew him as the boy who lost interest in Cub Scouts once he finished building the spice rack. It's an amusing collection of characters (his gruff mom, his soft-spoken Italian father, his guido brother, confused gym teacher, etc.) and he plays the assortment well, but the trouble is that his material isn't especially funny. Jokes about young Paul's ability to fold fitted sheets, his ineptness at t-ball and his belief that Kate Jackson is the hottest of Charlie's Angels because she got the best set of cheek bones would grow tiresome quickly if Stroili wasn't such an engaging actor.

He's even more ingratiating as himself, and though his audience participation quiz show is cute ("Which NFL team's colors can also be described as sea foam and cantaloupe?"), Straight Up With A Twist is most appealing when the actor/writer simply talks about his experiences without dishing out the punch lines and just gives it to us straight.