In an allegorical mode, My Barking Dog concerns today’s society and the environment as a problem but with a comic coating. The play begins with monologues by two loners in the same urban apartment building who receive visits by a hungry coyote, probably from a nearby park. From then on, they experience a call of the wild. Toby, a former office manager (Miles Duffield’s kinda-cute doofus), hasn’t worked for nine months. He spends his time trying to get a computer to aid him getting a job but, mostly, he tracks the activities of all of his neighbors. His major skill seems to be scheduling these. He’s been cut off from his family for some time. Now the same is true of all the others he has known in the city. Compelling Catlin Hargraves’ plain, pointedly numb Melinda works a night shift alone. That helps her avoid talking to people. She feeds sheets of paper into a machine. Her daydream involves what might happen if she fed herself in as well. She lives in an apartment on a side and downstairs from Toby. From their back porches both note a visit from a hungry coyote. Melinda lays out hamburger for him and soon he’s visiting both her and Toby. The couple meet and get to know each other and to identify with the coyote. The animal brings Toby street-kill that ends up being his sustenance. Melinda feels akin to a representative of nature that civilization has banished from his natural wild land. She begins a scheme to restore it to the coyote and his like. Both Toby and Melinda go wild, sometimes funnily but ultimately madly. Director Daniel Kelly keeps a train of monologues on a steadily climbing track. He helps each actor register final high points at which they’re hard to recognize. What is certain is indicated by the scenic background: a picture in back of each apartment of the building’s milieu with a screen of large squares in front of it. The effect is of a concentration camp in which what is civilized is on one side. Which one? We’re left with that question. Eric Coble’s intriguing play comes as an auspicious beginning for Urbanite’s new season. The upstart group is definitely up in every way, including technical proficiency. The actors’ excellence owes much to the offstage crew’s help.
