'The Little Dog Laughed' Too Comedic to be Taken Seriously

“Hell hath no fury like an agent scorned” seems to be the enduring message of Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed,” a sharp chamber comedy that fiercely satirizes Hollywood wheeling and dealing and probes issues of gay identity in the popular media.

The Tony-nominated play makes its New England premier at the Wembly Theater at the Calderwood Pavillion, directed by Paul Melone and running through Feb. 16.

The play focuses on Mitchell Green (Robert Serrell), a young actor confused about his sexual orientation and attempting to reconcile a budding public life with a newfound relationship with Alex (Johnathan Orsini), a New York callboy whom Mitchell orders to his hotel room in a drunken stupor. As Mitchell and Alex become increasingly involved in their affair, Ellen (Angie Jepson), Alex’s catty girlfriend, and Diane (Maureen Keiller), Mitchell’s agent, become entangled in the events, which begin to spiral out control under the press’ watchful eye.

Certainly, when Beane wants laughs, he is capable of conjuring them. His greatest creation is Diane. Acid-tongued and relentless, she is single-mindedly driven to purchase the rights for a play in which Mitchell will (heroically) portray a gay man. Her willingness to verbally abuse all comers into submission until the terms of the contract read “in perpetuity through the end of time” is representative of a character that is shallow, but delightfully so. Keiller’s performance is masterful; her character is in total control of her huge catalogue of barbs and imposing enough to silence the background music herself without saying a word.

Other highlights include enlightened discussions on Breakfast at Tiffany’s (“The movie, not the novella”), guidelines for coming out of the closet as a public figure (“Are you British? Are you knighted?”), and a monologue comparing the transience of Buddhist sand mandalas to Hollywood executives ordering salads and later excreting the contents.

Orsini and Serrell oscillate between the tender and the wooden. Moments in which the two examine their hang-ups over their sexual orientation, which extend far beyond simple denial, find the two at their best, filled with passion tempered by history, doubt, and the public eye. Other scenes can be downright awkward: when Alex and Ellen first interact at a club, the writing becomes far too blunt for the complex emotional situation.

In this way, Beane’s words at times threatens to overwhelm his plot. While Diane, who seems to be made purely of plastic, venom, and dynamite, can rhapsodize and finish off with an expletive-filled punch line, the same sort of writing comes off as glib in the mouths of more earthy characters like Mitchell or Alex. The real success in this method of punchy writing is Ellen, whose inexhaustible supply of sarcastic retorts only makes her helplessness starker and ultimately moving.

Beane’s play is constructed as a progressing series of monologues and dialogues, allowing the characters to alternate private thoughts and conversational self-discovery. One of the play’s greatest strengths is its ability to weave the four narratives of the characters together in a way that isn’t cloying or overly connected. Some of Ellen’s monologues often have little bearing on the plot of the play, but these and similar moments create the context that keeps the play from being one-dimensional.

The play ultimately walks a fine line between satire and something more tragicomic. One feels that a send-up of Hollywood and its literary cannibalism can’t be the end goal of the play; the target feels too easy. The play is stunted emotionally by its one-liner mentality, and while it may intentionally explore the superficiality of Hollywood culture in its dialogue, its affectation is almost good enough to fool the audience when the content begins to become serious.

This line of thinking makes the ending seem dubious. The play explores the unwillingness of characters to open themselves up and become vulnerable, but by the end, everyone is still more shut than is expected.

Still, Beane’s play ultimately accomplishes a great deal: four memorable, often riotously funny characters are crafted out of a series of delicate interactions, satirizing the absurd, cut-throat world of Hollywood. Most remarkably, the play creates an accurate, realistic relationship between Alex and Mitchell for the majority of the play’s duration, presenting it exactly as it is and nothing more.

“The Little Dog Laughed” serves up the human—and, perhaps more importantly, the comically inhuman—in just a few witty words.