It takes both talent and moxie to make it in show business.
And Paul Downs Colaizzo, the 27-year-old playwright whose first play Really
Really opened at the Lucille Lortel Theatre on Tuesday night, seems to have
both.
According to the several profiles that have already been done on him
(click here to read one) Colaizzo had moxie enough to walk up to director David
Cromer in the street, strike up a conversation, and, eventually, get Cromer to
stage his play’s New York production, with follows its premiere at the Signature
Theatre in Arlington, Va. last year.
And although Really Really is far from perfect (beginning
with the vapid title) it shows that its author has got talent too. And he’s also got something to say, both to and
about the members of his generation.
It’s obvious that this is a young writer’s play. It’s occasionally
too on-the-nose and not as insightful as it thinks it is. But Colaizzo gets big points for breaking
outside the comfy sinecure of domestic drama to take on the issue of
class in this country. And although I didn’t agree or like everything he has to
say about it, I admire him for speaking up.
Colaizzo wrote the first draft of his play while he was
still in college at New York University’s Tisch School of
the Arts. It was around the same time that some Duke University lacrosse players
were accused—wrongfully, it now seems—of gang raping a woman who’d been hired
to perform a strip number at one of their parties and a similarly complicated
sexual incident sets off the action in Really Really too.
It opens with two young women—Grace and Leigh—returning to
their dorm room from what seems to have been a boozy college party. The next
morning, Leigh, a scholarship student, admits that she had sex with Davis, a
rich and hunky good guy on campus, who also happens to be a good friend and teammate of her also wealthy
fiancé Jimmy.
When Jimmy returns from a family vacation, Leigh claims the
encounter was rape. Davis says he was so
drunk he can’t remember what happened but insists he’s not the kind to force
himself on a girl. Their mutual friends—a
handy cross section of slacker jocks and ambitious geeks—try to get as far away
from the mess as they can.
For, much like Lena Dunham and her controversial HBO show “Girls,” Colaizzo is tough on his peers, portraying them as total narcissists concerned solely by what they can gain from a situation. As Grace, president of the school’s Future Leaders of America chapter, says in a speech she delivers directly to the audience, their motto is “What can I do to get ahead?”
The "Girls" connection is driven home even more by the fact that one of that show's stars Zosia Mamet (yes, daughter of David, who wrote the he-said-she-said drama Oleana) plays Leigh. Adding to the production's coolness factor is the presence of Matt Lauria from the cult TV show "Friday Night Lights” as Davis.
But this is not just stunt casting. Both Mamet (click here to read a Q&A with her) and Lauria are excellent, as is the rest of the seven-member cast. During
the talkback that followed the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended, Colaizzo said he most identified with Johnson, the friend played by the black actor Kobi Libii. So I wish I were going to be there for one of the three performances when the playwright steps into that part while Libii
films a TV pilot this weekend.
As always, Cromer is a master at getting his actors to plumb
the emotional depths of their characters.
Although I could have done without his decision to have the clunky scene
changes in which stagehands come out to push the bulky set around as the action moves
back and forth between the students’ apartments.
Colaizzo says that Really Really is the first part of a
trilogy called “Want, Give, Get.” The
other two are supposedly already written and I’m betting that based on the
reception to this one (the show has already been extended until March 24) they’ll
get produced. And I, for one, plan to be
there to see them.
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