The wellness industry takes a drubbing in Quack, Eliza Clark’s acerbic comedy now in a world premiere at the Kirk Douglas. The quack in question is Dr Irving Bauer (Dan Bucatinsky), a vain, narcissistic, excitable dispenser of medical advice on national TV. His afternoon show (think Dr. Oz) is popular among stay-at-home women who over the years have come to trust his counsel. But when Quack opens, we find Dr Bauer in off-stage distress, owing to a magazine article which has sharply criticized him for questioning the wisdom of the anti-measles vaccine. Although he didn’t quite say that the vaccine caused autism, some of his viewers took the hint and decided not to vaccinate their kids. When two of them died in a measles epidemic, River Humboldt (Shoniqua Shandai), a freelance journalist, jumped on the story and turned it into a take-down of the celebrity doctor, one that accused him of having caused those deaths. With his reputation maligned and his TV career at stake, the hysterical Dr Bauer nearly has a nervous breakdown in his upscale office (revolving set design by Dane Laffrey). His TV sidekick Kelly (Jackie Chung), a cool, calm ex-nurse, advises him to go public with his reaction to the story, be upfront and honest about everything. Kelly is over-ruled, brutally and profanely by Meredith (Jessalyn Gilsig), Dr Bauer’s strident wife (“I’m a cunt from hell,” is how she describes herself). Meredith, who pitches diet supplements on TV, believes that the way out of this mess is to go low against River, smear her reputation and impugn her motives. River, whom we get to meet early on, is a young African-American woman who weighed over three hundred pounds at one time and used to watch Dr Bauer’s show to get tips on how to lose weight. Dr Bauer’s vendetta against her is as savage as it is ill-advised. The last character in this uneasy comedy is Brock (Nicholas D’Agosto), the hippyish leader of a movement dedicated to making men great again—by putting women back in their traditional, subordinate places. He tries to persuade Dr Bauer to become the spokesperson for this burgeoning movement. Dr Bauer turns him down at first, but changes his mind when the network cancels his show and replaces it with one starring his former assistant, Kelly. Male revenge rears its lion-like head (the jungle metaphor is courtesy of the slick-talking Brock). Quack has a lot to say about the war between the sexes today and about our celebrity culture. There are some serious and touching moments in the play, but most of the time its issues are played for comedy of a snappy, wise-cracking nature. The big obstacle that playwright and director Neel Keller face is in making us care about these mostly unpleasant, unsympathetic characters. But such is the vitality and pizzazz of the two-hour story—and above all the cast’s wonderful work—that we somehow get caught up in its flow.
