The thing with reunions is that they always boil down to the same big ideas: Nobody’s the way they used to be, friendship is treacherous, and you can’t go home again.
Stephen Belber’s new dramedy, “The Muscles in Our Toes,” tries to get around those clichés by raising them to cartoonish extremes.
Chatting about the good ol’ days isn’t enough for a handful of high school friends who meet again 25 years after graduation. Believing one of their buddies had been kidnapped by African terrorists, they hatch a harebrained plan to free him.
Apparently, even the most laid-back, ordinary Joes can go overboard.
“I feel like we should do something on Jim’s behalf,” says Les (Bill Dawes), a flat-topped doofus who works as a fight choreographer.
“Like what?” asks the amiable Reg (Amir Arison).
“I dunno — something with balls.”
Whipping everybody into a testosterone-fueled frenzy is alpha-male banker Dante (Mather Zickel), who claims a dual Italian-Jewish heritage, though his younger brother, Phil (Matthew Maher), points out that he’s “about as Jewish as an uncircumcised crawfish.”
Everybody is on the receiving end of rapid-fire attack jokes that usually zero in on ethnicity, religion and, most of all, whether one is man enough — this is like David Mamet rewriting “The Big Chill.”
Anne Kauffman directs this Labyrinth production with zest, and Lee Savage’s set re-creates a school music room in realistic detail. Even so, it quickly becomes obvious that the premise makes little sense.
Cutting through the tiresome male aggro like a knife through bloat is another classmate, Carrie, played with an edge of enraged despair by the fantastic Jeanine Serralles.
Every time she’s onstage — which isn’t nearly often enough — the shambling play gains focus. At just $20 a ticket, you could do worse than check out the show just for her blistering performance.