I wasn't looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with Laughing Wild at Carolina Actors Studio Theater. Watching a previous production that starred April Jones and Sidney Horton, two accomplished performers, I'd felt harangued by Durang. But under T.J. Derham's sparkling direction, C.A.S.T. lightens the barrage of verbiage while intensifying visual interest and physical comedy. That makes all the difference when you're spending the better part of two hours with a psychotic on furlough from Creedmoor Mental Hospital and a Zen apprentice who lapses into paranoia.
Leslie Beckham as the mental patient is the first to tell us of the fateful encounter at the supermarket. She uses all of the big thrust stage, a bursting bundle of compressed energy -- so volatile, she'll even mouth off to a New York taxi driver. Then there's Michael Simmons, no less brilliant as the nerdy neurotic with raging outbursts of his own.
The fantasia revs up in Act 3 when the two weirdos appear in impossibly bisecting dreams, reliving the supermarket fiasco over and over -- with fresh overlays of comedy, gunfire, and canned tuna spillage. Somehow the two are soon dreaming against each other as the woman transforms herself into Sally Jesse Raphael and the man visits her talk show as the Infant of Prague. Kelli Harkey's costume design for the toddler divinity is priceless, inspiring the most profane and hilarious physical comedy of the evening.
Attending last Wednesday's preview, I had to miss the Vegas Night madness slated for Thursdays when ticket prices are determined by rolling dice, spinning a wheel, or dunking a rubber ducky. Don't make the same mistake.
