If love wasn't so damned resistant to following orders, about 99% of songs, poetry, plays, and movies would have to find new topics: serenades to kayaking, odes to geodes, dramatic interpretations of haggling for a better price, and more Lily Tomlin-John Travolta pairings. But the mercurial meanderings of romance have provided the nuclear fuel of scribes long before the atom had a name, continues despite a contemporary world of topsy-turvy storybook dreams, and a future where the idea of love has to be reconstructed from the detritus of a collapsed civilization.
Two plays seen back-to-back in small Union Square theaters offer very different voyages on the love boat. Peaches en Regalia reflects the familiar contemporary foibles over which many of us stumble to dramatists' endless delight, while The Nature Line takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where survival of the species has forbidden physical intimacy in favor of controlled reproduction. But, as suggested above, love breaks rules even when it doesn't know that there are options to the rules.
Steve Lyons' Peaches en Regalia, now at Stage Werx, is in the spirit of a summer-love comedy that has shifted away from recognized reality by a notch or two. Basically, it's the snappy, slightly absurd story of two men and two women who, after a few missteps, couple up correctly in the first act, while a second act about one couple's pregnancy goes off the comedic rails until happiness is again restored.
The play, directed by Sara Staley for Wily West Productions, is at its best in quirky little moments of revealing human behavior. Syd (Cooper Carlson) longs to be a dude with swag who can throw off a wink that is always properly perceived. When practicing his wink in the men's room at a diner, the more wink-skilled Norman (Philip Goleman) gets the wrong vibe, creating for Syd "a tectonic shift" in the relationship between these two men who have never met. Norman neither notices nor cares.
The diner is the domain of Peaches (Sarah Moser), who quit her job at Merrill Lynch to become a perky waitress whose signature dish is peaches en regalia, a grand name for a rather prosaic offering: peaches and cottage cheese. Her best friend is time-management expert Joanne (Nicole Hammersia), who plucks at her angora sweater whenever things go off schedule. But Peaches ends up with Syd, and Joanne with Norman, and all is well until the second act begins.
"We're supposed to change the set for Act II," Syd bellows to his unseen fellow actors, as Lyons breaks away at the fourth wall and gives Norman a chance to expand on the difference between Republicans and Democrats. But the main issue is Syd's buyer's remorse about becoming a father. But other than an amusing accelerated time continuum, to which Syd hasn't been invited, the second act doesn't sustain the fragile pleasures of the first.
Nearby, at the Phoenix Theatre, J.C. Lee's The Nature Line moves us ahead several centuries as humankind tries to regroup after an asteroid has wiped out most of the population and much of the social structure. Produced by Sleepwalkers Theatre, this is the third installment in J.C. Lee's trilogy The World and After that employs different characters and theatrical tones to glimpse the world at three points in the calamity.
In the barren new world, scavengers go looking for, not food, but words �" scraps from pages of books that they try to assemble jigsaw-like into meaningful statements. For Aya (Charisse Loriaux), it is time to have eggs removed so they can be fertilized in a laboratory because the process of human delivery has been compromised by the ecological catastrophe. The laboratory is an anomaly amid the devastation. "Aren't you relieved that a corporate mode can survive the apocalypse?" asks a nurse in her well-starched uniform.
Aya is always told her test-tube babies are born dead, and her suspicions lead her to explore the facilities. She comes across a glass cage where studly young men are allowed to frolic until it's time for them to don their milking machines with scraps of comic books used to facilitate masturbatory fantasies. Against all the rules, Aya connects emotionally and physically with one of the milkmen (a quietly sensual Joshua Schell), and they lead an escape from this homogenized prison.
Playwright J.C. Lee's mind is a fertile place as his characters can come forth with intelligent humor, wisdom, wonderment, and mystery. Director Mina Morita has directed the large cast that tells a sprawling tale with smoothness that pulls forth both the comedy and the angst of the situation, where love once again trumps all rules. The seed has again been planted.
Peaches en Regalia will run at Stage Werx through Aug. 27. Tickets at www.wilywestproductions.com. The Nature Line will run the Phoenix Theatre through Aug. 27. Tickets at www.sleepwalkerstheatre.com.