We are in Hollywood, on the eve of the Academy Awards ceremonies, in a hotel room decorated in a pastiche of 20th-century glamor, where Tommy Miller—hitherto the cute-but-dumb star of giggly-gross teen-sex comedies, but tonight, a Best Actor nominee for his performance in a highbrow dramatic film—might just be on the brink of a new career as a serious artist. His devoted boyfriend George and ditzy sister Molly wish him success, but his closeted agent, Eddie, insists that no openly-gay actor has ever won a Big Oscar and that Tommy must be swaddled in a six-inch thick veneer of heterosexuality.
Chris Woodley has supplied his bedroom farce with all the ingredients of that venerable genre—broadly-drawn characters of inflexible temperament, nubile young pretties in scanty undies, stream-of-double-entendre dialogue, mistaken identities, slamming doors, showers of balloons and confetti, Weekend-at-Bernie’s slinging of bodies knocked out or passed out, a punch-up or two, and copious amounts of alcohol. Since Woodley is an alumnus of the BBC series “The Eastenders,” he also includes a number of pre-Shakespearean literary devices more acceptable to his fellow Brits than to us yanks—asides, repeated catch-phrases and ethnic slurs directed at citizens of (gasp) IRISH ancestry—and since his parable is set in the United States, the mayhem also utilizes Trump name-checks, handguns, fart jokes, barf jokes, "clap-on" light fixtures, unexplained glimpses of fetishwear and cocktails with silly names.
Fortunately, the cast assembled by director Jay Españo is well-drilled in the "something right NOW" techniques of Chicago-style improv and are able to sustain momentum of their overloaded text for most of the 90+ minutes before it deviates from classical protocol to conclude with almost everyone happier and wiser for their realization that—as new-age celebrity blogger Kiki Lopez declares—owning your truth is the best course of action.
There's no denying the script's need for some whittling down (Woodley should decide, once and for all, whether Eddie will finally see the light like his colleagues, or will have to be pushed off the balcony twice to learn his lesson), but there's enough material left for a Pride-month laugh or two, especially when delivered by an ensemble with the charm to pull off a six-foot boyo wearing full Hibernian regalia, and the panache to retain control of their looney-tunes universe.
