Live Theatre Workshop has gone to the dogs. And oh, is it fun.
The company is staging “Sylvia,” an A.R. Gurney comedy about a dog who disrupts the lives of Kate and Greg, married upper-middle-class Manhattanites.
You could say it is about a marriage on the rocks or a man in the midst of a midlife crisis.
Those elements are there, but come on, who cares about those things when Sylvia is around?
She is not just any mutt. She talks, she swears, she manipulates and, in Hannah Turner’s paws, she causes non-stop laughter.
Kate (Jodi Ajanovic) and Greg (Josh Parra) are empty nesters who finally can live their life without the burden of children to care for. Kate is ecstatic; Greg is untethered. But he finds purpose: on a stroll in Central Park he comes across Sylvia, begging for attention and, no doubt, food.
Greg, who hates his job, has finally found purpose. On the other hand, Kate loses it when she finds a shaggy dog on her couch. And Kate quickly realizes that Sylvia consumes her husband’s time and love.
The cast is strong in this Lesley Abrams-directed production. But sharing the stage with Turner, who gets all the best lines and biggest laughs, has got to be tough. You get the sense that she has prepared to play the role of the dog her whole life.
Lori Hunt takes on multiple roles, and she matches Turner for laughs. Watching Hunt on stage is almost like a master class in how to inhabit characters, whether it’s a full-of-advice dog owner, a nose-in-the-air friend of Kate’s, or an androgynous shrink whose best advice to Kate is shoot the dog and divorce her husband.
“Sylvia” isn’t brilliant, stirring theater. But who cares when you can spend two hours laughing. If this is a dog’s world, we want more of it.
