As always in these apparently Utopian situations, there turns out to be a sugar daddy. Donavan (Malcolm Madera), the rich owner of the building, uses the money-losing restaurant Dear and Wyatt run downstairs as a tax write-off, paying them and their lovers in room and board. Since this is a New York City story, it isn't giving too much away to mention that the realities of real estate play a part in the plot. But the meat of the play is its acidic depiction of the fearsome foursome through the juggernaut of Act One, and the challenge posed to them by Evan's cynicism in the slower and slightly too preachy Act Two. When things begin to fall apart in Act Three, it feels inevitable; these characters are simply too big for the temporarily comfortable life they've created for themselves.
And the center, the emotionally volatile Billy, cannot hold. Running his radical newspaper, engaging in frantic phone conversations with his revolutionary compatriots in Mexico, defusing conflicts right and left, he is a fount of endless nervous energy, but at the same time he's frozen in place, an idealistic man out of time, powerless to effect real change in the world. When this paralysis manifests physically, Billy is reduced to a raw lump of feeling, like the horribly transformed fly-creature tumbling out of the transporter pod at the end of David Cronenberg's The Fly. It's a captivating moment, and it sends us reeling into the street feeling provoked, enlivened, even a little bit enlightened.
Pictured: Matthew Pilieci as Wyatt, Mandy Nicole Moore as Dawn and James Kautz as Billy. Photo by Larry Cobra.
The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side by The Amoralists runs through June 28 at P.S. 122. Visit the P.S. 122 website for times and tickets or call 212-352-3101.
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