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Weddings of Mass Destruction

nytheatre.com review by Matt Schicker
August 15, 2005

If the style and format of Weddings of Mass Destruction feels familiar, it’s because GayCo Productions, the comedy collective who wrote and performs all of the material, is the gay offspring of Chicago’s famous Second City. (Additional material is by Mary Beth Burns and Matt Elwell.) And in the Second City tradition, the sketches are topical, full of edgy wit, and performed with only minimal furniture (a few metal chairs) and an accompanying pianist (Stephanie McCullough). What makes GayCo unique, however, is their commitment to comedy where “gay is the given—not the punchline,” a refreshing sentiment in the age of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which GayCo targets in a brilliant and affecting sketch.There are about 20 sketches in Weddings of Mass Destruction. Bookended by two scenes involving a double gay wedding, the evening makes use of a wide range of styles, from pantomime to group and solo musical numbers to traditional sketch comedy; none of it seems to be improvised. Among the hilarious highlights are routines involving a disastrously clumsy date between two women, a couple’s Twilight Zone-like trip to a sex toy shop, and a couple of straight guys from Massachusetts who get more than they bargained for when they marry each other for insurance reasons. A couple of the sketches prove the troupe isn’t afraid to take on touchy political issues; one of the funniest of them can hardly be better described than it is in GayCo’s press release: “Iraqis wreak homo-rific Abu Ghraib revenge.” The piece that really is a satirical bulls-eye, however, is a send-up of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy featuring cuddly TV queers performing a “Stepin Fetchit”- style minstrel act in “pink-face.” The incisive social commentary hits twice as hard because they’ve got you laughing.The six versatile performers in Weddings of Mass Destruction are uniformly strong actors and singers, and together form the tight ensemble this kind of comedy requires. Celeste Pachous, with her hoarse, high-pitched yelps, makes the biggest impression of all, however, in a very funny sketch in which a game of Old Maid hits dangerously close to home for one of the players. The other players—Jim Bennett, John Bonny, Andy Eninger, Judy Fabjance, and Mandy Price—are game for anything and are skillful physical comedians, too.Though there are a couple sketches that aren’t as inspired as others and fall a bit flat, the only serious weakness of Weddings of Mass Destruction is a less-than-crisp pacing. Director Jim Zulevic, who otherwise has done a fine job with the wide variety of material, hasn’t perfected the technical timing of the ending and beginning of each piece; often the audience hesitated to applaud after the punch line because of imprecise lighting and sound cues. However, under the extremely rushed circumstances of participating in the FringeNYC Festival, this sort of technical sloppiness is understandable, and it ultimately doesn’t detract from the audience’s enjoyment.