‘Mr. Sadness’ Examines Powers of Love
As a battle-scarred veteran of the singles scene, MTV wordsmith Barry Yourgrau offers “semiautobiographical” tales of romantic disaster, “saturnine valentines” of tragic couplings that exist in a surreal dimension. A nebbish, bespectacled gentleman with thinning hair and a manic energy in his delivery, Yourgrau spews forth his wildly absurd stories from his latest book, “Mr. Sadness of Sex,” in his entertaining LunaPark show of the same name.
In Yourgrau’s primal imaginings, his kinky date shrinks herself to Barbie doll size and saucily romps in the spaghetti and a cow joins a strip poker game.
Yet these Freudian frolics in the realm of the absurd have a twitching, nasty ring of truth at their heart because “romance is often the recipe for total catastrophe and total failure,” and love is “a hideous toxin.”
No lovey-dovey sappiness here, but rather an intellectually droll, hyperbolic examination of love’s devastating powers.
* “Mr. Sadness of Sex,” LunaPark, 665 N. Robertson Blvd., West Hollywood. Today and Feb. 21, 8 p.m. $7. (310) 652-0611. Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.
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