There’s little to laugh at in 9/11 comedy ‘Tragic’

You get the feeling playwright Craig Wright thinks he’s on to something in his 2003 off-Broadway "Recent Tragic Events."

You can just imagine him in his study: "Hey! How about a play that’s basically a comedy that takes place in a living room two days after the World Trade Center disaster and involves a girl going on a blind date whose sister may or may not have been killed? Wouldn’t that be wild? I mean, a comedy about the World Trade Center! Nobody’s ever thought of that!"

So we get jokes like, "(It was) a really bad day for Kevin Bacon," and "(There’s a) great new series on called ‘America Under Attack.’ " I don’t get the cleverness in Wright’s approach, and I would imagine not very many of us are yet ready to laugh about anything connected to the events surrounding Sept. 11, 2001. Maybe in a hundred years or so.

Wright gives us the plastic characters we’d expect in a mediocre television pilot. Waverly (Stacia Zinkevich) is the worrying sister: beautiful, catered to, confused, kind. Her blind date Andrew (Thomas Chrastka) is an emotional mouse, incapable of making the slightest decision. Ron (Tony Foresta) is the kooky but reliable neighbor friend. Nancy (Candice E. McCallum) — the script’s only original character — says little but thinks a lot about all the big philosophical issues. And she’s got a small puppet of Joyce Carol Oates that takes on life-size dimensions. She’s the ultimate hanger-on.

Wright ends the comedy suddenly, about three quarters into the second act, and the characters get serious and make speeches announcing the script’s themes. It’s like watching a "Roseanne" episode that turns into an Ingmar Bergman movie.

Director T.J. Larsen overdoes the simple comedy as well as the melodramatic moralizing. He pushes too hard. He’s particularly weak in hiding the excesses of Zinkevich, who tends to hit the same excitable note all through the long evening.

Chrastka, though, comes across as an amusingly authentic innocent as Andrew. Foresta projects a likable, gently self-mocking manner that feels genuine. And McCallum — in a Santana T-shirt and a mop of hair that covers much of her face — seems in a perpetual daze. You believe the psychological babble that comes out of her mouth because McCallum looks like the kind of character who would invent that sort of thing.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.