Most comedy nowadays relies on familiarity with current movies and television, but not since the Free Associates disbanded has there been a show geared toward playgoers who spend their leisure time seeing other plays. The syllabus of Anne and Greg Taubeneck's two-person musical romp references a number of classic playwrights—Shakespeare, Williams, Chekhov and Beckett, among others—and while everybody might not see the humor of a convent so small "it only had three sisters," they can always chuckle over its being financed by "a loan from Penny Pritzker."
We begin with a middle-aged couple in Kenilworth, equipped with three children and three dogs (whose names are often mixed up), who fall on hard times after Stanton is arrested for insider trading, sending him and his wife Elizabeth into temporary Stanley-and-Blanche mode. Both engage in Chekhovian introspection as "Stanislaus" languishes in minimum-security prison (the windows have only one bar) and she, in the aforementioned cloister.
Upon the former's release, the McStans mount a failed attempt to usurp the Thane of Goldman-Sachs, recover their morale with the help of a Mamet-style pep talk, but then are plummeted into Beckettian despair. All is not lost, however—though Stanton is ready for some peaceful Rodgers and Hammerstein, Elizabeth chooses a more intriguing future. ("It's as good as it gets/We're doing Tracy Letts!")
The conceit of life-as-theater also permits Stanton and Elizabeth to comment on the decisions of the literary gods guiding their destinies—Stanton, trapped in a trash-can, sighs, "I guess this rules out Noel Coward," while Elizabeth welcomes the departure from blank verse to Mametspeak with a cheerful "shorter speeches, no rhymes."
Under Rachael Mason's direction, the authors/performers' agile repartee—enhanced by composer/sideman Jonathan Wagner on piano, air-bagpipes and Russian jailkeeper accent—never flags in its lively pace, despite costume changes executed at lightning speed in a barely bedroom-sized auditorium.
Raising the curtain on the characteristically short (80 minutes, including an intermission) presentation inaugurating the second space in the new Annoyance Theater is a duo dubbed “Flip Flop,” aka Ashley Thornton and Andrew Daniels, whose improvised cross-gender scenarios range from titillating (a masseur confronts a severely sunburned customer), to creepy (a tattoo artist drugs his eager date's drink), to outright revolting (the wife of an incarcerated convict professing to be sexually aroused by fantasies of her spouse being raped by his fellow inmates). Put your brains on hold for the first half, and smart rewards—did I mention the song about the manliness of wearing spandex?—will be soon forthcoming.
