EASTERN STANDARD
This may make Eastern Standard sound like an annoyingly didactic piece of theater. But playwright Richard Greenberg avoids that by creating genuine, likable characters, whose conversation is peppered with hilarious and insightful one-liners that come at just the right time to stop the play from becoming preachy or sentimental.
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Stephen Walker, a successful but frustrated young architect, has developed an enormous crush on a woman who eats lunch every day at the same restaurant he does. In the whiz-bang opening scene he’s dragging his friend Drew Paley, a successful homosexual artist, to the restaurant to get his opinion. Tony Rago gives a brilliant performance as the flamboyant yet down-to-earth Drew, and Matthew Mehl is perfect as the yuppie who’s outwardly stable and conventional but inwardly a suicidal jumble of lonely passion and confusion.
These three scenes are united when a brawl breaks out between Peter and the homeless woman. Stephen and Drew come to the rescue, and suddenly the lives of these six characters become inextricably intertwined–and all kinds of wonderful things happen. In a series of delicate moments Drew and Peter discover each other. In the emotional bedlam Phoebe confesses she’s been watching Stephen, then breaks down and asks him to take her home to his apartment.
