A Fine Romance

The Israel/Palestine conflict, homophobia, racism,
anti-Semitism—not exactly what most of us are looking for in an
evening at the theater, right?

But before you ditch your theater plans in favor of Paul Blart:
Mall Cop, consider that playwright David Mamet tramples all over
these topics and more in Romance, a frenetic courtroom farce
that skitters heedlessly from legal conflicts to global ones—and
it’s funny. Mamet’s script is acerbic and irreverent, and as the
loopy, drug-addled judge presiding over Theatre Vertigo’s production,
Garland Lyons gives what’ll likely be remembered as the finest comedic
turn by a local actor this year.

The Judge is allergy inflicted, pill addicted, and generally
indifferent to the trial unfolding in his courtroom, where a
chiropractor (Tom Moorman) is charged with an unnamed crime. Not even
the Defense Attorney (Nathan Gale) believes in his client’s innocence,
while the long-suffering Prosecutor (Gary Norman) struggles to maintain
professional decorum even as his relationship with his hot young
boyfriend (Ben Buckley) is fraying. It’s a convoluted collection of
seemingly irreconcilable conflicts, and Lyons rules the courtroom with
high-handed indifference, lurching between tangents and pausing
occasionally to pop another pill. Here, justice isn’t just blind, it’s
fucked up.

One of the funniest bits in a very venomous script is a squabble
between the Episcopalian Defense Attorney and the Jewish Defendant, who
butt heads over their respective religions and trade insults that are
legitimately offensive but pretty damn funny nonetheless (“Your people
can’t order a cheese sandwich without mentioning the Holocaust”). The
catfight ends when the two hatch a harebrained scheme to bring peace to
the Middle East—the one thing standing in the way of the plan’s
success (aside from the inanity of the plan itself) is the Judge, whose
permission they need to leave the courtroom.

The script itself is all over the place, from meandering witness
interrogations to domestic squabbles about pot roast—but while
it’s occasionally hard to discern just what Mamet is getting at, it’s
undeniably enjoyable spending an evening with this ensemble, watching
him get there. Lyons’ tremendous performance is bolstered by a
predictably excellent cast, who, under the brisk direction of Collin
Warren, breeze through Mamet’s script in just under two hours.