REVIEW: Comic duo ignite hilarious but uneven 'U.S. Drag'

By ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Tuesday, November 25, 2008 10:17 AM PST ∞

Over the past half decade, Laura Bozanich has emerged as one of the shrewdest comic performers around town. Pair her with newcomer Karson St. John as her equally droll sidekick, hand them scene after scene of sharp, speeding banter and you've got a post-millennial Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz whose misadventures are hilarious, spot-on satiric and piquantly sad.

Playing off one another like a practiced team, Bozanich and St. John are the pulsing comic heart of ion theatre's latest laudable production, Gina Gionfriddo's "U.S. Drag."

Gionfriddo's a tremendously gifted, if spotty, writer who burst on the national scene with "After Ashley" at the 2004 Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville.

That bifurcated comedy opened with a mother-son scene powered by such original, energetic and hilarious yet poignant writing that it jolted audiences wide awake. The crackling dialogue for a role-reversed pot-smoker telling all to her alienated son led on to her murder by a vagrant whom her spouse insisted she "help." The smarmy widower capitalized on the death, becoming a talk show host as the play morphed into a  broader satiric comedy about America's sensationalizing culture of celebrity.

Gionfriddo, a writer and producer for TV's 'Law & Order", tackles that theme again in "U.S. Drag." This time her mocking treatment of our obsession with violence is more effective and more oblique. Though her writing still sometimes spatters its targets and her ending shifts tone unaccountably, the ion production has an energy and headlong momentum that carries the evening.

Director Claudio Raygoza surrounds the leads with a surprisingly skilled cast and makes the best of the company's intimate studio space, using rolling platforms to keep the action (usually) roiling.

St. John plays Allison and Bozanich is Angela. One's a "summa," the other a "magna" from some unnamed college where they must have stormed the English department before landing in New York as consummate hard-drinking party girls. They're intent not to get stuck as editorial assistants, "making copies in the basement of Conde Nast." On the other hand, these slim, pretty playthings don't want to be poor, either.

Their schemes for "earning" money while avoiding jobs involve conning a timid Wall Streeter into sharing his fancy flat and maneuvering a trust fund do-gooder named James into forking over taxi fare for two. Soon enough, the gals decide the best way to cash in is to lure a famed serial batterer named Ed in hopes of getting a $100,000 reward for information leading to his arrest.

Bozanich's character is the vaguely more sensible of the pair; she's eventually forced to begin work in a bookstore where she's in "Special Events." There she meets a wacked-out poet and memoirist, played (and written) big and broad by Sven Salumaa. His over-the-top narcissism gets nicely counterpointed by Bozanich's deadpan. Soon enough they're dating ---- sort of, until Bozanich demonstrates her unerring comic timing and her Angela tells him off. Her description of his unending cycle of oozing and tending to his unhealed psychic wounds is one of several comedic high points.

St. John's Allison, with her rat-a-tat-tat timing, flirts with a sentimental, happily married ending, corralling bland James, a "helper" who gets his jollies reciting (and crying over) the names of victims of the Green River Killer.

The most cannily crafted scene in "U.S. Drag" puts these two ill-matched couples together for a ridiculous truth-telling  parlor game that cranks the comedy up to side-splitting and anxiety-driven levels. Blabbing on about the illness of Michael J. Fox, Allison screams "I don't want to have Parkinson's and have no one care" before she collapses in a heap.

The quest of these hotties for something "extraordinary" leads them to the neurotic center of pop culture, with its passion for voyeurism and virtual lives.

The "girls" accomplish something special with Angela's book about being assaulted by Ed, thanks in part to Allison's skill as her pushy agent. She calls the book "sort of feminist solidarity meets softcore." But then Gionfriddo veers off course into parallel lectures in a penultimate scene both preachy and tonally off.

Still, the sheer energy of Gionfriddo's writing, her keen ear for shallow literary salesmanship, the profusion of with-it zingers and the fun of the lead performances make this playwright's local debut a most welcome one.

"U.S. Drag"

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays; through Dec. 21

Where: ion theatre at the Lab at the Academy of Performing Arts, 4580B Alvarado Canyon Road, San Diego

Tickets: $10-$23.50

Phone: (619) 374-6894

Web: iontheatre.com