The Little Dog Laughed

DIANE. Come now, Mitchell -- you're just having another one of your little adventures.
MITCHELL. I don't have adventures.
DIANE. Please. You're like Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn on a raft made out of rent boy.

Ahhhh ... that's better. A quick-witted comedy that hits some true relationship notes, and kept me guessing about where it was going and how it would end: that's what the doctor ordered. Specifically, the doctor ordered The Little Dog Laughed by Douglas Carter Beane.

On the surface it's a Hollywood satire like The Player or Tropic Thunder, but the satire drops away pretty quickly as the quirky love story at the heart of the play quickly takes center stage.

Beane does an interesting juggling act, where three out of the four characters all appear to be the protagonist at one point or another. Our initial POV character seems to be Diane, the sharp and driven Hollywood agent. The play quickly leaves her behind to foreground the story of Mitchell, the almost-big star "who suffers from a slight ... recurring case of homosexuality" ... and when he starts to fall in love, I instantly though I knew where we were headed, into a coming-out comedy that would end up being like a Pride Day Special Episode of Entourage.

It's only as the story grows more complex, dealing with all kinds of pressures in all kinds of lives do we learn the play is untimately the story of Alex, Mitchell's rentboy paramour. He's a street hustler, and Beane flirts with all the stereotypes this prince/pauper pairing could entail, but doesn't give an ending that I anticipated at all. Almost out of nowhere, Alex makes a decision I didn't expect ... but for all my surprise, it seemed perfectly natural and in-character once I thought about it. It's the kind of moment you get at the optometrist office: one flip of a lens and it all suddenly comes into focus.