As Bees in Honey Drown, Theater Review

[KilgoreTrout]

I took the Warden out to our local theater to see the limited-run satire by Douglas Carter Beane, As Bees in Honey Drown. Yes, I had to miss a couple innings of the world series, but I found the play to be entertaining enough.

The plot is not at all complex. A debutant writer gets chatted up by a name-dropping, cash-waving socialite bent on getting the writer to pen the screenplay of her (the socialite's) life. The scam is obvious to the viewer and the script is fairly thin before intermission, but the acting in this particular performance was terrific.

Our hero swallows the bait, and though he's gay, the socialite cons the writer into sleeping with her. She runs up sizeable debts and drops his name when it comes time to pay, then she vanishes.

The post-intermission acts consist mainly of flashbacks that reveal the con. One particularly amusing scene covers the transformation of "Brenda" - a frumpy diner waitress and hanger-on to a struggling artist, into "Alexa Vere de Vere" New York socialite. She beings the transformation by parroting the lines of Golden Age actresses - Hepburn, Grable, Taylor, and blending their cadence and quotes into a veneer irrisistable to the almost famous. She seeks out "the next biggest" writers, actors, sports figures and woos them with 1940's celluloid drivel. And they all rise to the bait.

Our hero is bent on revenge. In a fun series of flashbacks, he tracks down several of Vere de Vere's conquests. Eventually he finds Vere de Vere's Tristan-like former lover - the painter from New York, and discovers that, like himself, the painter denied who he was (a gay painter in a crappy New York loft) to be transformed into what Vere de Vere wanted him to be (a straight capitalist producer of schlock). Our hero hatches a plan to trap Vere de Vere, but the play ends somewhat differently than expected. No spoiler.

I haven't read the play, so I'm not sure if the stunning gender reversals and sexual tension are in the text or should be credited to the director of this production. Vere de Vere is the dominator, manipulating star-crossed debutants with her veneer. The males are gay, but their awkward tenderness toward each other is touching - "cute" was the word my wife used.

Perhaps because Worcester, MA is one of the most backward towns in the region, there were no guy-guy kisses or female nudity, even though the script obviously called for it. But it worked in the sense that as the men moved closer to each other, obviously to embrace, the lights would dim and the scene would change, teasing the audience and letting them play out the scene in their own minds. Likewise, when a nubile female is posing for her topless photo session, she covers herself with her hands, embarrassed, and finally, when she summons the courage to bear all, the lights go out and the scene changes. It worked.

Overall, the script was pretty weak but the acting and directing made this an entertaining satire and, I think, a must-see, especially before the film version comes out (with Madonna rumored for the Vere de Vere role).