BWW Reviews: BEYOND THERAPY Thrills Through May 14 at Westport Country Playhouse

This year marks the 80th season of The Westport Country Playhouse. Whether or not it was intentional, the season's opening show is Christopher Durang's Beyond Therapy, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. What a match made in heaven!

Here's the plot: Prudence (played by Nicole Lowrance), a writer for People magazine, answers a personal ad from Bruce (Jeremy Peter Johnson), a divorced bisexual lawyer. Suffice it to say their date did not go well, with all the wrong things being said and giving each party plenty to talk about to their therapists, Charlotte Wallace (Kathleen McNenny) and Stuart Framingham (Trent Dawson). Also in the cast are Bruce's lover, Bob (Stephen Wallem), and bad boy waiter Andrew (Nick Gehlfuss). If you need to know the end, Bruce and Prudence are expected to get married, but part is totally anti-climactic to the show.

The heart and soul of the show is the merciless satire of psychiatrists and McNenny steals the show as the loosey goosey therapist who calls her patients porpoises, cheers them on with a stuffed Snoopy ("Ruff! Ruff! Ruff!") and loses their files. Her lampooning a nutty shrink who makes references to the psychiatrist in Equus is almost an inside joke because she once played the magistrate in Equus. Not that Dawson is a slouch as the uptight egomaniac psychiatrist who seduces his female patients and threatens Prudence with electroshock therapy because she wants to end their doctor-patient relationship.

It's a given that the cautious, perfection-seeking Prudence would be matched with a therapist who is sexually both aggressive and dysfunctional, and the socially awkward, bumbling Bruce would be paired with a lexically confused, forgetful self-obsessed therapist. The bonus here is in the casting. Lowrance is totally believable as the insecure thirty-something woman who is struggling to find an ideal relationship and invariably ends up with unsatisfying ones. If McNenny runs away with the show, Johnson is nipping at her heels with his flawless timing, restrained rubbery reactions and innate charm that makes anything forgivable -- even to a woman he alienates from the get-go. Durang's intent was not just to parody therapy and psychobabble or to tap into people's insecurities about relationships, but to channel the screwball comedies of the 1930s. Johnson and McNenny and director David Kennedy totally understand that and deliver it with purity and perfection. The set design by Lee Savage is as smart and put together as the characters are not. Kevin Brainard's design for the cards and program cover for Beyond Therapy couldn't be better thought out and executed. It features a woman who is almost naked and totally vulnerable, surrounded by the disconnected paper doll pieces of her life. How perfect is that?

Beyond Therapy runs through Saturday, May 14. For tickets or more information, call 203-227-4177 or go to www.westportplayhouse.org.

 

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