Susan Chenet's self-described "crappy comedy" hearkens to the "Hollywood-is-Full-of-Greedheads" plays—vitriolic diatribes penned by incensed playwrights following their initial forays into big-time industry screenwriting. The genre encompasses David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, Arthur Kopit's Road to Nirvana, John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone, Sam Shepard's Angel City, Lee Blessing's Rewrites, and Beth Henley's Control Freaks, among others, but is now less frequently invoked as stage-to-screen writers grow thicker-skinned.
Theatergoers with long memories will also detect in Chenet's narrative structure similarities to "Backstage Disaster" farces, examples of which include The Play That Goes Wrong, Noises Off, and countless two-handers premised on backers' auditions.
We begin Dingleberries with meek middle-school teacher Jonie James, currently under administrative censure for saying the word "sex" to her students during a discussion of Lysistrata. (If Aristophanes strikes you as an odd choice of curriculum for seventh-graders, wait—it gets odder.) In her spare time, though, she has written a play, soon to be produced by a local theater with connections to the Big Time, but as rehearsals proceed, company artistic director Phil, artistic producing director David, production director Jay, and sexy leading actor Michael take to wreaking major conceptual changes on the script, shrugging off the protests of the increasingly distressed authoress.
Playgoers recalling Interrobang's made-for-virtual comedy The Spin can attest to Laura Berner Taylor's skill at portraying harried multitasking wife/mom/career women, so the role of Jonie—who recites Greek tragedy when she needs to "talk herself off a cliff" and calls her play "my baby"—fits easily into the having-it-all femme-com stereotype, while the posturing "auteur" Jay, rendered with Stanislavskian swagger by Matthew Martinez Hannon, is an object of mockery dating back to Menander.
Despite the copious sizzle the cast strives to impose on their text, rolling their eyes and swooping in to kiss the camera, when a story of already cartoonish proportions starts out loud and shrill and contentious, there is nowhere it can go but down a road we have traveled many, many, many times before.
