Putting it all on the table

Anne Meara’s After-Play might be the perfect comedy to attend if you’re dining out with dear old friends you haven’t seen in ages. That is also pretty much the situation in After-Play, now on stage at the Walnut Street Theatre’s Independence Studio.

Meara is an ace comic, actress, TV-product huckster, wife of Jerry Stiller and mother of Ben and Amy. That all gave her plenty of fodder for her screenplay about two show-business couples of a certain age dining at a trendy Manhattan restaurant after a Broadway play.

Meara has a youthful vigor and sharpness, as well as a marvelous comic flair. None of this is so surprising. She and her husband have written hilarious comic material for many years.

After-Play concerns aging couples and their traumas over their children, and Meara’s oldsters don’t settle for empty phrases. The conversation is zesty, the emotions intense, the breakdowns, arguments and reconciliations distinctly theatrical – as you might expect from people in their line of work. Topics like money, sex, doctors, aging and death provoke Meara to blunt, vivid specifics, often couched in bawdy wisecracks: A woman announcing her arrival at menopause adds, "I had my last Tampax bronzed."

This wry comedy, full of hilarious insights and apt observations, might just strike you as an extended revue sketch.

Plays with a single restaurant table to anchor them tend to be notoriously adrift. To give the proceedings metaphysical weight, there is the waiter, Raziel. His name means "secret of God" or "angel of mysteries," according to rabbinic lore. For Miss Meara, this translates into being black, gifted with supernatural medical and meteorological powers and, best of all, being able to function as waiter and bartender at the same time.

In the play, two couples have been to the theater and, on this chilly and snowy night, have arrived for dinner – a little sustenance (largely liquid) and a little postmortem. The New York couple, Marty and Terry (Louis Lippa and Jo Twiss), consider the play "an epic," whereas their highly sophisticated country cousins, Phil and Renee (David Howey and Susan Moses), regard it as "murky" at best.

Marty and Terry are still emotionally drained by the play, while Phil and Renee, show-biz types from the Coast, are curiously untouched. Marty isn’t ashamed to admit that he was moved to tears. Terry says, "The scene with the mittens, I just went to pieces." Renee asks, "What mittens?" That’s how it goes.

The conversation ebbs and flows about civil rights, racism and the liberal conscience, love in the post-menopausal league and animal rights. The most amusing friction comes between the two women. Roommates many years ago, their attitudes have diverged sharply, but their tongues have remained razor-sharp. Terry, an unabashed bleeding heart, upbraids Renee for her mink coat. Renee is without shame. "My guilt list is so long, this coat is not even a contender," she responds airily.

Moses’ Renee is more tightly wired and blunt, unable to rein in her impulses to control everyone around her. While downing a succession of vodka Gibsons – always ordered without the onions – she is appalled when Terry lights a cigarette. In turn, Terry is appalled by Renee’s willingness to eat veal. When the reunion seesaws from the sentimental to the bitter and back again, Renee says, "This whole evening is becoming an extended root canal."

Jokes and gibes sally back and forth across the table, yet the mood slowly darkens after the Paines (Paul Nolan and Susan Stevens), who are acquaintances of Marty and Terry, enter the restaurant. The sullen-eyed woman is a little the worse for drink, and it emerges that the Paines’ son, whom it was said died of leukemia, actually died of AIDS.

Death, in a horribly familiar form, has intruded upon the camaraderie, and although the wounded couple retreats, the tone has irretrievably altered. Even the urbane waiter (Steven Wright) cannot quite change that final aftertaste of sadness.

Nothing really happens in the course of this dinner. We learn that friendship is important and not always easy, and that as life goes on, death stalks even cocktail parties.

Meara tries to squeeze too much into this single evening, overloading revelations about life and careers, change and loss, and children and parents as if she fears she won’t get a chance to write another play. She also isn’t as subtle as she could be, sending people to the bathroom so others can talk about them and introducing an extraneous couple to open an even more lethal assortment of wounds while we wonder about the absence of other diners in this serene, posh restaurant.

Director Michael Licata keeps this 90-minute straight-through production on track at a brisk pace. The well-chosen cast members are seasoned pros who nail the laugh lines but also make an interesting character study. When it comes to décor, Andrew Thompson could work his scenic wonders at a few restaurants in town. All things considered, the trip to the Walnut was worthwhile.

After-Play
through Sunday
Walnut Street Theatre
Independence Studio
825 Walnut St.
Tickets: $24
215-574-3550
www.wstonline.org