Review - Paper Dolls: What's In The Daily News? I'll Tell You What's In The Daily News…

Attractive people saying bitchy things while wearing sexy outfits and drinking too much. No it's not another BroadwayWorld staff meeting, but New York Daily News entertainment writer Patrick Huguenin's Paper Dolls, a funny and promising new play about the world of celebrity gossip that just closed its run at the New York International Fringe Festival.

Gossip columnist Claire Cunningham (Jen Jamula) is young, fabulous and at the top of her field, so naturally she's horribly depressed. Determined to lounge on her well-stocked rooftop for the remainder of the summer, her former child star brother Austin (Billy Magnussen) has taken an emergency leave from the Guam set of his latest surfer movie to help her deal with her breakdown in his own supportive way. ("I am offering to take you somewhere where they muddle their own sour mix!")

Paper Dolls squeezes its juice from a setup where the scandal hunter finds her own sexual hi-jinks, an affair with a married columnist from another publication, have become front page news. The story was penned by her former assistant Tammy (Allison Goldberg), who had been working for Claire's lover and used her under covers skills to help establish a name for herself. ("You slept with the competition. That's enterprising. I slept with the boss. That's slutty.") Meanwhile, drunken party girl Isabel (Ashley Morris) proves to be more than just a one-nighter for Austin. (Oh yeah - Tammy used to sleep with Austin, too. Would you like a scorecard?)

Director Gaye Taylor Upchurch and her terrific cast play up the strengths of the script very well. Jamula and Magnussen have Claire's dry depression ("You know how WASPs show sympathy? With hot love and cocktails") and Austin's genial dumbness ("My publicist says if I can get into a fight without incurring serious damage I can get a major role.") bouncing off each other with warm sibling affection. Goldberg and Morris each offer interesting variations of intelligent, resourceful women who hide their brains and put their sexuality and bubbly personalities in the forefront in order to get what they want. Morris also shows excellent comic instincts, getting howls from well-delivered straight lines, and Goldberg gives the most interesting performance of the night as the ambitiously cunning woman on the rise who is inexperienced enough to make rookie mistakes.

While Paper Dolls has the makings of a real crowd-pleaser, as she stands now there isn't enough empathy to support its complicated plot and the laughs, while certainly potent, aren't frequent enough to sustain the ninety minute piece as a flat-out comedy. The production crawls for the last third of the play, where the plot resolution turns somewhat serious. And I'm sorry, if you're going to have the characters continually commenting about how there's no wall at the edge of the roof, please have the decency to have one of them fall off it by the play's end.

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