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The Random Caruso
By JENNA SCHERER
del.ico.us
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The Random Caruso, a new play currently at the BCA from Centastage, is the work of a Hollywood burn victim. It's the kind of bitter, hard-edged, I-hate-the-biz-so-much-I-love-it comedy written by scarred veterans of the Hollywood meat factory, walking the same stilettoed path as Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed and Theresa Rebeck's The Scene. That is to say, it's nothing much new. But the stage's love affair with the movie business will never wane, even though the screen rarely reciprocates. And for a world premiere by a playwright with few credits to his name, Caruso is a slick and well-turned-out package.
Caruso is a toast to the symbiotic relationships that keep the movie machine humming. Screenwriter plays toadie to asshole star till get his script gets optioned; actress-cum-waitress boffs asshole star till the Lohans come home, lands a bit part in upcoming movie; asshole star doesn't drop out of upcoming movie, producer gives screenwriter's script a shot. You get the picture. In the hands of the underrated Centastage and artistic director Joe Antoun, playwright Andrew Clarke's poison-tipped repartee seldom flags; he even gets the stage crew in on the game. In Michael Forden Walker, Robert Pemberton and Tracy Oliverio, Antoun has found actors more than up to the task of Caruso's acidic humor.
The play's most vindicating moment comes in the main character's eleventh-hour diatribe about the lowly lot of the screenwriter. Clarke's commitment to that particular subject is what sets Caruso apart from other screen-on-stage fare. It all makes for a solid, if not surprising, evening of Tinseltown bitchery.
[The Random Caruso. Until 3.7.09. The Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Theatre, 539 Tremont St., Boston.
617.933.8600. Times vary/$25. bostontheatrescene.com, centastage.org]
