Hurrah At Last

Rather like a planet circling the sun is the appropriately titled Roundabout Theater Company, which, not because it wanted to, has been forced to move its location twice this decade. While awaiting the completion of its new theater on 42nd Street, the Roundabout production of Richard Greenberg's Hurrah at Last is currently at the Gramercy Theater on 23rd Street. McCarter Theater audiences had a sample of Greenberg's use of dramatic irony when his dark and disturbing play, Safe As Houses, had its world premiere there in March, 1998. Now you can get a sample of Greenberg's lighter side with Hurrah at Last, a very funny, if slight, comedy that may remind some of Neil Simon at his peak.

In it Laurie (Peter Frechette), a talented, well-reviewed and published novelist is, nevertheless, a mess. As we see him at a holiday season gathering of family and friends at his sister and brother-in-law's Soho loft, he is a bundle of nerves, sweats, anxieties, envy, doubt, and disdain. Further, he cannot help but openly announce his resentment toward Oliver (Paul Michael Valley), his best married and straight friend, a hack writer of money-making plays and screenplays. Oliver is making lots of money and Laurie is not. When the fawning, smug Oliver, who is not above pandering to Laurie's attraction (he actually strips bare for Laurie's amusement), remarks that "money doesn't buy happiness," Laurie's reply -- "But it can upgrade despair so beautifully" -- gets a laugh. But it is also a clue to the play's theme: Why can't art be as commercial as dreck?

While succumbing to the effects of a growing fever that will soon put him in a hospital bed, Laurie is responding to the man who has recently been asked to adapt one his own more obscure novels for the movies. The remark provides the spark that ignites the suffering Laurie, as he confronts the play's other characters from both his hallucinatory and real perspectives. These include Oliver and his non-English speaking wife Gia (Judy Blazer), who appear to be as adept at making money as they are guiltless at making babies. Gia comes to the party with a baby in her arms. Conversely expensive infertility treatments have put a strain on the marriage of Laurie's sister Thea (Ileen Getz) to Eamon (Kevin O'Rourke), another man cursed with the Midas touch.

The Jewishness of Laurie's parents (Dori Brenner and Larry Keith) is given plenty of room for hilarious expression, particularly by their compulsively negative thinking, by their own victimized values, and, of course, by their taken-for-granted prosperity. The emotional havoc created by a terrific cast is hilariously balanced by the physical wreckage caused by another guest, a 200-pound mastiff (played with scene-stealing assurance by Dreyfus).

Is Laurie's failure to make money fatal? You may wonder as perpetually manic Frechette perspires on cue. Are Laurie's fortunes due for a change? Don't ask. Although the play runs out of comic invention before it is over, director David Warren gives Greenberg's fanciful notions every opportunity to make his point about the fickle nature of happiness.