STAGE REVIEWS : ‘Reunion’: Feeding Time at the Zoo

There are 143 ‘f’ words in “Reunion” at the Cast Theatre. Only kidding. But that’s close to the mark. The setting is an Italian-American bar in Queens, and the raw language takes on a syncopated rhythm that’s curiously intoxicating.

Four of the five actors, including playwright Angelo Michael Masino and director Andrew DeAngelo, hail from New York, and it shows. “Reunion” is so redolent of barroom squalor with an East Coast accent that the production (with a terrifically grungy set design by Andy Daley) begins to assume the trappings of urban folklore.

Masino and DeAngelo, who teamed on the scabrous “B-Sides” at the Cast in 1991, are like a latter-day Bowery Boys. Only now there’s a Bowery Girl (lean and mean Christine McQuade) whose purple tongue lends new meaning to women’s equality.

Events turn romantically sappy at the fade-out, but the core of the production is feeding time at the zoo. And the major animal is a hulking primitive outrageously played by Joseph T. Zito, dangerous and hilarious.

Masino deftly plays a transplanted Californian home for a Queens reunion. Life in Southern California is weird, he says, because “nobody hits anybody out there.” Adam Andrews has his bartender down like a rock. Only Tom Reilly as a local hanger-on seems misplaced.

* “Reunion,” Cast Theatre, 804 N. El Centro Ave., Hollywood . Fridaysd-Saturdays, 8 p.m., Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends Feb. 28. $12. (213) 462-0265. Running time: 1 hour.