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Red Pajama Blues

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RED PAJAMA BLUES reviewed by Martin Denton

Brad McEntire's play Red Pajama Blues is an entertaining but uneven offbeat comedy about depression. Its protagonist is Rex, a young man prone to bouts of anxiety who has sunk deeper than ever before: for the past two months, all he's done is sit on his couch in his red pajamas, staring emptily into space. Rex's sister Betsy and his best friend Thomas conspire to lift him out of his funk, eventually literally tickling him into submission. Rex agrees to a blind date with a young woman named Lydia, and meets her, hopefully but warily, at a local restaurant.

The climactic scenes, depicting Rex and Lydia's date, suggest that Red Pajama Blues is about the redemptive power of love, or at least the healing power of human contact. But the denouement, which is something of a letdown, indicates that McEntire has something else on his agenda here-I'm not sure precisely what. McEntire sets Rex up as a victim of outrageous circumstance: his first girlfriend leaves him to spend time in an induced coma, Lydia turns out to be in the FBI witness protection program, his sister Betsy is pathologically needy and selfish, even the waitress in the restaurant scene has an unlikely optical disorder whereby she turns whatever she looks directly at into stone. The non-sequitur absurdity is funny but inconsistent, and it undermines whatever strength of character Rex might actually possess: in a world as off-kilter as this one, could anyone possibly keep himself afloat?

The production at FringeNYC is spotty, with Stephen Ross (Rex) and Nichole Greevy (Lydia) faring quite well in the central roles and Todd Faulkner (Thomas) and Jennifer Ward (Betsy) faltering in supporting performances that push way too hard; Jacqueline Kabat scores laughs as Rex's first girlfriend and the weird waitress. McEntire has staged the play himself, somewhat unsteadily: the mood shifts from antic to serious and back again without much warning or sense of purpose, and to uncertain effect. (This is true of McEntire's script, too, so who's to say which came first.)

There's certainly evidence of talent in Red Pajama Blues. But in its current state, the potential feels mostly unfulfilled.