The digital magazine of New York indie theater
Loading

The Dirty Talk

nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
August 15, 2005

Michael Puzzo's very funny and unexpectedly moving comedy The Dirty Talk tells an unlikely tale about two unusual but ultimately very likely men—and it does so with such refreshing candor, wit, and intelligence that we are at once disarmed and entirely engaged by it. My fellow reviewer Leslie Bramm happened to be at the same performance, and he remarked afterward that during the play he had formulated three different possible endings for the story, but that Puzzo had trumped him by coming up with a completely different conclusion. That's great storytelling. See The Dirty Talk: it deserves to be the sleeper hit of FringeNYC 2005.It takes place in a cabin (in "the mountains of Jersey," according to the program—our first clue to the sometimes sardonic deadpan voice of our playwright). It begins with a man, who we will eventually learn is named Lino, wandering into said cabin; tentatively, he gets the lay of the land: a big oversized bed in the center, outfitted with a deerskin blanket; a small TV and a laptop computer; a box of condoms and a copy of Playboy; and lots and lots of cardboard boxes, most of them labeled "GLASS."Outside it is pouring down rain. Lino settles himself on the bed, and another man, Mitch, storms in. He is soaking wet, and he is very angry with his umbrella.(Allow me to digress here and tell you that The Dirty Talk's actors—Kevin Cristaldi as Lino and Sidney Williams as Mitch—perform this opening pantomime with such panache that we are immediately hooked. Cristaldi summons up acres of urban savvy as he silently peruses the space; as for Williams, blustering into the room with a half-destroyed umbrella on which he furiously finishes the job before our astonished eyes—well, I haven't seen an entrance like that since John Malkovich burst hyperkinetically onto the set of Burn This on Broadway, 18 years ago.)Mitch and Lino, it develops quickly, are stranded here, at least for a while. The rain is pounding; the phone is dead ("This is like a B horror movie," Mitch observes); the car's engine is flooded and its windshield wipers are gone (we'll find out how that happened later on). And the men are, at the moment, clearly antagonists—though the exact reasons for why they've ended up here together and what precisely went awry in their meeting are not at all evident to us, not yet. Much of the fun of The Dirty Talk is finding all of this out, and I'm not planning to spoil any of it—I want you to see it for yourself. What I will tell you is that the sexual tension you think you're aware of is absolutely there; and the direction of Puzzo's remarkable narrative—a little bit modern-day tall tale, a little bit urban legend—continually shifts with the balance of power in this remote cabin, tantalizingly and compellingly. Finally, it's a story of what it means to become a man: of self-acceptance, compassion, understanding, and authentic courage.The tale takes in ex-wives, fathers, deer hunting, spelling, and—especially—an unforgettable night in an Internet chat room. Puzzo's writing is dark, hilarious, and frequently, as the play's title suggests, dirty. It's also joltingly honest. Padraic Lillis's staging is as close to perfection as I can imagine, which is to say I never saw evidence of it once. The design elements are capital by FringeNYC standards. The performances are spectacularly good; the chemistry between Cristaldi and Williams is like a great comedy duo's, so surely do they play off one another.