The play’s title, Café Society, is ironic. The five inhabitants of the café–a Starbucks on the West side of L.A.–certainly do not comprise a society. On the contrary, each is locked into his own little world, typing away on computers and tablets, pretty much oblivious to the other.
What forces them to face up to their isolation and form something of a community is the impact an intruder named Martin (Nick Cobey) has on them. A wild-eyed, hysterical radical who claims to have a bomb in his knapsack, Martin takes them all hostage and threatens to blow the joint up. What’s his grievance, you ask. He answers that question in a long, loud harangue in which he denounces them for their disconnect from the world and from each other. “You’re more interested in your Facebook profile than you are in global warming,” he shrieks at one point.
Martin is a caricature, of course, a one-dimensional activist with a slightly comedic side: he’d deactivate his bomb if he’s allowed to speak with Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, and lecture him about the evils of corporate franchising.
Peter Lefcourt is a veteran TV comedy writer (“Cagney and Lacey,” “Desperate Housewives”), which accounts for the uneasy mixture of the serious and the satirical in Café Society–and the overall unreality of it. The play, in a world premiere at the Odyssey, pretty much is a series of gags, held together with a flimsy narrative.
At the same time, it must be said that Lefcourt is good at jokes and tries at all times to keep tongue firmly tucked in cheek. He wants only to entertain, he makes clear–and in that regard, he has succeeded.
The show has a lot of laughs, and the opening-night audience (okay, most of them were probably Lefcourt’s friends) seemed quite happy with things.
Lefcourt’s wife, Terri Hanauer, directs all of his plays (he’s written seven others) and gets his humor. She also works well with the actors in Café Society; they include Chandra lee Schwartz as an actress (mistaken for a hooker when the curtain goes up); Eric Wentz as a wanna-be screenwriter (who’s always searching for the ‘human condition’); Ian Patrick Williams as Anastasia, a cross-dressing, self-styled Russian princess; Susan Diol as a brisk real-estate agent; and Eric Myles Geller as a “libertarian personal wealth consultant.”
Donathan Walters plays a Starbucks barista, and Kailyn Leilani and Gabriel Romero make brief appearances as a TV reporter and LAPD captain, respectively.>
Yee Eun Nam’s projection designs—two overhead screens which allow us to see what the characters are emailing and texting about—give a lot to the production as well.
