Following in the feel-good footsteps of “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” here comes “Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays.”
The basic presentation is the same. Likable actors — in this case, Craig Bierko, Harriet Harris, Beth Leavel, Polly Draper, Richard Thomas and Mark “Mr. Kelly Ripa” Consuelos — take turns acting out various texts from behind lecterns, which also hold the script. When they’re done, they sit back on chairs and watch their comrades.
The overall tone is similar as well, balancing comedy with well-placed notes of melancholy, regret and longing.
But while we’ve been wearing clothes for quite a while now, gay wedlock is a much newer reality, at least in some states — a portion of the show’s ticket price goes to organizations fighting for marriage equality.
The eight writers featured here — including Moisés Kaufman, Mo Gaffney and José Rivera — consider that evolution from various angles: jitters, adapting straight vows, coming up with new traditions, legal issues, and traveling to Iowa to wed.
Luckily, the lone playwright with two contributions is Paul Rudnick. The author of “Jeffrey” and “The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told” has few peers when it comes to sharp one-liners, and Harris is the perfect actress to fire them off.
In “The Gay Agenda,” she’s a defender of the traditional family who claims to like everybody, “even the Chinese, because their wonderful children made my jacket” — and then starts hearing bitchy gay voices inside her head.
Harris makes a 180-turn in “My Husband” as a competitive liberal trying to find the perfect groom for her gay son. In both cases, the actress gobbles up the scenery as if she were Ms. Pac-Man.
It goes without saying that the biggest downer comes courtesy of Neil LaBute, though his tale of two newly wed men who run into tragedy is touching, even sensitive.
Director Stuart Ross keeps the 90-minute show moving swiftly, with great help from the overqualified cast. Thomas shines as a grieving widower in Kaufman’s “London Mosquitoes,” while Leavel and Draper make a sweetly bickering couple in both Gaffney’s “Traditional Wedding” and Wendy MacLeod’s “This Flight Tonight.”
Still, by the end you wonder who else is going to exploit this format, cheap to produce and effective. Can anthologies about puberty or Occupy Wall Street be far off?