Plot thin, ennui thick in ‘Wild’ Belfast Maskers take on Durang play

If you go to a play by Christopher Durang, you can expect certain hit-you-upside-the-head themes. Urban angst, sexual irreverence, psychobabbling nutsos, the unworkability of religion – this is the stuff of his career, manifested most popularly in “Actor’s Nightmare” and “Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You.”

Durang’s 1987 comedy, “Laughing Wild,” which opened last week at the Belfast Maskers Theatre in Belfast, is a melange of these stress-in-the-city preoccupations. The central conceits of the play are the poetic line “laughing wild amid severest woe” and a chance meeting of two hypersensitive urbanites buying cans of tuna fish in a supermarket. He can’t make up his mind which tuna to buy, and she can’t stand waiting behind him so she beans him on the head.

Except for a surprise visit by the Infant of Prague (is there any other way for the Infant to visit?), that’s as much plot as Durang dangles over the heads of the audience. “Laughing Wild” is more of an absurdist performance lecture than a drama. Yet in its own Durangian way, it delivers a story about loneliness and malaise that can be jaw-dropping and, in a one-liner kind of way, quite entertaining.

Otherwise, this is not one of Durang’s most viable scripts, and Belfast Maskers director Robert Hitt has rightly played up the potential intimacy and drollness of the more successful moments. Even when the play takes ridiculous turns, Hitt doesn’t overstate the ludicrousness.

The characters – simply “man” and “woman” – may not be the type of people you want to spend two hours with. They are more like people you get stuck talking to at a cocktail party because everyone else has already heard their tales of woe, self-searching and an insatiable inner longing for personal assuagement. “Are you enjoying my company or do you wish I’d go away?” the woman asks the audience. You’ll have to answer that question for yourself, of course. But here’s a possible comeback: “Go away.”

Longtime Maskers performer David Skigen plays the man, as well as the Infant, and brings a sometimes funny, sometimes annoying sitcom quality to the character. Victoria Covill and Kim Tripp take alternate nights presenting the woman. The night I attended, Tripp handled the role with admirable nuance and impertinence. But both roles are fairly one-dimensional and circuitously chatty. The combination of qualities can be, at times, taxing because we’ve heard all this before – and Woody Allen does it better.

The new thrust stage at the Belfast Maskers Theatre feels cramped compared to the old proscenium stage but it does create an in-your-face theater experience, which is perfect for the spirit of Durang’s play.

“Laughing Wild” will be presented Thursday-Sunday through Sept. 2 at the Belfast Maskers Theatre. For more information, call 338-9668.