Don Zolidis’ The NSA’s Guide to Sex and Love, directed by Stephen Woosley, with assistance by Kyle Jepsen, opened at MadLab on Thursday. This satire, structured as a TED talk with two agents (Colleen Dunne and Scott Douglas Wilson) sharing what they’ve discovered looking into America’s bedrooms, tries to deep dive into the data mining surrounding dating. The play works brilliantly in discrete scenes with some wildly funny set pieces, but, viewed as a whole, disperses into a sitcom fog.
Following a typical “progression” from finding a partner, through hooking up, commitment, cracks appearing in the relationship, the play works best when it skews dark and absurd. The inherent clichéd quality of the framework almost gets by just on the charm and commitment of the actors. The men are simpletons, the women are wise but with with little motivation the play cares enough to show us. A premature ejaculator with severe social dysfunction, Dan, is given a great, edgy read from Casey May full of confusion and barely-submerged darkness. helped by playing off Laura Spires’ Alana, all crackerjack timing and riotous physical comedy. Spires’ charm and electricity in playing an “average person,” the hardest of roles, made me wish she had more to work with. A very funny Scott Clay is the indecisive Chuck, a put-upon everyman lucking into a relationship with the vivacious Daisy (an astonishing Alanna G. Rex). The Clay and Rex scenes, at their best, are a hilarious skewering of the typical sitcom trope of the schlub man/gorgeous wife and a sendup of percentages and data used to roadmap the heart.
Dunne and Wilson, with some very funny wordless assists by Lance Atkinson’s Agent Lance, have the hardest job here, providing the spine of the piece, and their performances are strong enough for the challenge. Dunne in particular does a great job – with not a lot of material – of making her agent a cipher but implying a real, flesh-and-blood person underneath. Wilson’s performance is fantastic when he leans into the character but sometimes he lapses into – funny – impressions that seemed to underline the thinness of the words.
There’s a degree of viciousness that made me laugh a great deal, as they try to answer, “Can’t this power be abused?” with a double-edged answer that goes into, “If you see a child, can’t that be abused? Or my girlfriend?” And a line delivered by Dunne, “Rest assured, your worldview is entirely correct.” I wanted a little more evil in these characters, the play’s bending-over-backwards to wink at the dangers of the surveillance state but still have everyone live happily ever after made the play feel obvious and tiring. The attempt at ambiguity near the end comes as too little, too late.
The anarchic energy in the set pieces is Woosley’s bread and butter and he has a terrific cast for it, going from screwball comedy to social satire to sex romp at the toss of a shoe or the raising of an eyebrow. His taste for the absurd also gets indulged in too-small doses for my taste but those disconnects from reality are delightful. With such a rich potential for satire, my real disappointment came in how easily this could all have been a sitcom anytime between ’72 and ’94 and how long it felt. With all the Mars/Venus jokes we’ve sat through over the years, this deserved to have a sharp knife, either a machete swung erratically with passionate rage or a scalpel slyly harvesting organs.
The NSA’s Guide to Sex and Love runs through April 9th with performances at 8pm Friday and Saturday. For tickets and more info, visit http://madlab.net/nsas-guide-to-sex-and-love.html