THEATER REVIEWS : Dark, Comic ‘Tales’ of One Man’s Rage

Have you heard the one about the guy who took his special breed of Chihuahua to the vet and found out he owned a rat? In Daniel Reitz’s gritty dark comedy “Urban Folk Tales,” New Yorkers trade these urban myths among themselves the way children tell ghost stories. The tales help expunge fear about city living and allow people the illusion of understanding life’s unpredictability.

The play follows the adventures of one voyager into this edgy city on one Friday night in the West Village. Charlie (Jon Matthews) listens to these tales from the people he meets with mock sympathy. He recognizes the stories as naive, a way to avoid thinking about the real evils of the world--the evils more frighteningly close at hand than the “friend’s friend” to whom urban myths purportedly happen.

In fact, Reitz’s characters are so enraptured with tales of poodles exploding in microwaves that they fail to see Charlie for what he is--a dangerous and seductive gay man prowling the streets of New York in search of targets for his rage. His viciousness is creative, and the source of his anger is left, at least at first, tantalizingly vague. Charlie is the kind of guy who hands the neighborhood alcoholic $10 and says, smiling, “Here, go buy yourself a drink.”

Charlie’s behavior grows increasingly outrageous as he gets better at playing God with the affections of people who respond to his insinuating smile. He ruins the relationship of a heterosexual couple, tortures a redneck bigot and has a nasty surprise for a fatuous actor who dares to pretend he’s really mostly straight.

Matthews is riveting as long as Charlie remains a mystery. His dark good looks border on seedy and salacious; he is convincing as someone smart enough to still outsmart most people even though he himself is slipping.

Director David Schweizer supplies an atmosphere of thick, ambient menace, and he is aided by Kevin Adams’ lighting. Lit by bare bulbs outside of doorways and hanging bar lamps, the characters always seem about to be enveloped by darkness, a metaphor for the metaphysical state of the city in the wicked world of the play.

But Schweizer cannot rescue the play from its two main flaws. The playwright too often allows himself to condescend to the people Charlie deigns to hate. DeeDee, the one woman in the show, is a chatterbox twit who sells advertising for Elle magazine. The playwright is as ungenerous to her as is her erstwhile boyfriend. (Steven Flynn, as the redneck barfly Dean, plays beyond the stereotype and manages to make this racist, homophobic loser funny and even sympathetic.)

In the end, “Urban Folk Tales” provides a context for Charlie’s anger. That explanation renders this compelling play more conventional and less interesting than it promised to be. But at least three-quarters of it offers a daringly comic and original vision, as well as a memorably twisted character with a dash of evil all his own.

* “Urban Folk Tales,” the Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood, Thursday-Sunday, 8 p.m. Ends March 5. $15-$17.50. (213) 660-TKTS. Running time: 2 hours.

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Richard Schiff: Bill Jon Matthews: Charlie James Parks: Matt Jeff Marcus: Brett Christopher Bradley: Ron Maura Vincent: DeeDee Blake Bahner: Chuck Steven Flynn: Dean Alan Boyce: Chris A Stage II Screen and D.W. Fairbanks/David Binder production. By Daniel Reitz. Directed by David Schweizer. Lights by Kevin Adams. Costumes by Candice Cain. Sound by Mitchell Greenhill. Sets by Richard Hoover. Stage manager Kevin Carroll.