Dead Funny (Third Rail Rep)

[October 8th, 2008]

They grow up so fast: Portland’s finest small theater company has outgrown its first home at the Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center and relocated to the less picturesque but larger and more convenient theater at the World Trade Center. The new venue, which Third Rail Rep hopes to call home for at least the next three years, seats 220, offers much better sightlines and fold-out desks for critical note-taking, and requires attendees to negotiate seemingly nightly proms to get to the auditorium. Well, you can’t have everything.

For the company’s first show downtown, director Slayden Scott Yarbrough picked a knockout: a blistering tragicomedy in the vein of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by British playwright Terry Johnson. Popular in the U.K. but almost unknown here, Dead Funny takes an uncomfortable and very funny look at the sex lives of five sad people united (mostly) by their peculiar obsession with English slapstick comedians like Benny Hill and Sid James.

The only one of the bunch who doesn’t care for the silly, sexist dreck that many Brits called comedy is Eleanor (Maureen Porter), who has bigger problems than having to put up with reenactments from Hancock’s Half Hour. Her husband, Richard (Tim True), purports to be a never-nude (though we do see his junk) and won’t touch her. He’s the president of the Dead Funny society, the other members of which are equally miserable. Nick (Damon Kupper) hates his job and lusts after his students; his wife, Lisa (Stephanie Gaslin), has showbiz fantasies and believes her headaches are portents of death; and Brian (John Steinkamp) can’t get over the death of his mother.

Thrown in a room together to mourn the passing of Benny Hill, they tear one another apart, viciously and hilariously, for two hours. It’s a brutal and bizarre thing to watch, a blend of broad comedy and marital tragedy that feels entirely natural. The ensemble is very, very good (and Steinkamp’s downright extraordinary), Yarbrough’s direction is deft and the script, though excruciating at times, is a masterwork. Don’t miss this one. .