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Apps, Drinks, and Drama at Table 17
Kara Young eats, spectacularly.
As the confirmed third wheel, the actor playing “everybody else,” not only does he devour the scenery as the very demure, very mindful River; he also gets to wear a bucket hat and practice his BDE while parodying the kind of bartender who lives to get laid “hard and often,” then snake his way between the leads as Eric, a smooth-talking alpha type who works with Jada as a fellow flight attendant and, eventually, offers her a shoulder to cry on, with a very swole arm underneath. Scenic designer Jason Sherwood has turned MCC’s Robert W. Wilson black box into the kind of swanky restaurant where the walls are upholstered in magenta velvet and the cocktails cost $20 — but also, as River warns his customers, “Those chips be stale and that salsa is store-bought, you can do much better than that.” Here, Jada and Dallas are meeting — not on a date, that much is clear. Though Lyons’s writing sometimes leans Hallmark, and though he occasionally rides a symbol a little too long and too earnestly (Eisen-Martin has to do a lot of semi-profound reflection on the metaphor of the “blind spot”), it’s the actors’ ability to foreground his cheekiness, wit, and energy that brings things back around.
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