Bachelor parties gone wild have gotten lots of stage and screen time. But if Leslye Headland’s wickedly comic play is any indication, bachelorette parties are more fun.
Not that the girls in “Bachelorette,” part of Second Stage Theatre Uptown’s series, are enjoying themselves all that much. Set in a lavish hotel suite reserved for bride-to-be Becky (Carmen M. Herlihy), the play depicts the increasingly dissolute goings-on of her supposed friends and hangers-on.
There’s the bitterly jealous Regan (Tracee Chimo), whose boyfriend has yet to pop the question; blond party girl Katie (Celia Keenan-Bolger), who wastes no time getting seriously wasted; and Gena (Katherine Waterston), who, when she’s not snorting coke, tries to keep Katie reasonably conscious.
Swigging from the champagne bottles cooling in the suite’s bathtub, the girls invite two guys they’ve picked up in a nearby bar to join them. They are Jeff (Eddie Kaye Thomas), a ladies’ man with a sardonic wit, and Joe (Fran Kranz), his pot-smoking, kindhearted friend.
It’s clear the girls envy and despise the overweight Becky, whose expensive wedding dress — Katie describes it as “a tent made out of the skin of infants”– they promptly tear.
Over the course of the evening, hookups abound, love blossoms and someone overdoses. The play’s main focus, though, is on the nasty back-and-forths that make the TV reality show of the same name seem tame.
There’s nothing terribly new here, but the talented young playwright displays a gift for incisive characterizations and sharp, comic dialogue. Nowhere is that clearer than in a hilariously detailed discourse on the sexual politics of oral sex.
Under Trip Cullman’s pitch-perfect direction, the performances are uniformly terrific. Chimo’s particularly fine at depicting Regan’s combination of bitchy venality and desperate, pill-popping vulnerability, while Thomas gets big laughs with his sly underplaying and Keenan-Bolger (“The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”) supplies the most realistic onstage vomiting since “God of Carnage.”
“Bachelorette” is one of a series of plays 29-year- old Headland’s written about the seven deadly sins, this one concerning gluttony. If the rest are this good, I can’t wait for the ones about lust and greed.