This ‘Little Dog’ is a wolverine

Want to play party games for mean people? Douglas Carter Beane’s terrific new show, “The Little Dog Laughed,”is a good place to start, but brace yourself for a dizzying whirl of showbiz machinations, sexual confusion, and brass-knuckled manipulation. Mr. Beane, himself an industry screenplay writer, knows whereof he speaks. Mamas, don’t let your little guppies go swimming in the shark tank!
 
A Tony nominee for Best Play of 2007, “Little Dog” is Beane’s most recent hit since his acclaimed “As Bees in Honey Drown.” Truth and illusion, Hollywood predators and their prey, the ever changing chimera of celebrity and the people who worship it - these are the coin of Mr. Beane’s realm.
 
Mitch, a handsome screen actor on his way up, likes to drink, and when he drinks, he likes to call “rent boys” to come to his hotel room. He’s not gay, of course. Oh no. A gay actor? Please.
 
He has an agent. The devil may wear Prada, but Diane wouldn’t dream of limiting herself. She will get what she wants, and she wants Mitch to get the lead role in the film version of a new hit play. The lead is that of a gay man, and Mitch, because he’s handsome - and straight, remember - would naturally be perfect for the role. It would make him seem not just open-minded, but noble. The playwright, who’s been burned once too often by Hollywood and its wicked ways, doesn’t even want the play turned into a film. Diane has to change that. She also has to tighten the leash on Mitch, who is developing an infatuation with the rent boy, a confused hustler named Alex. And then there’s the matter of Alex’s girlfriend.
 
It’s no secret that the world of moviemakers is like the picture of Dorian Gray - forever beautiful on the slick surface but hiding a soul of the most calculating artifice and treachery beneath. What’s wonderful about Mr. Beane’s play is that - provided you don’t get too close - this truth is devastatingly funny.
 
Director Michael Baron weaves the rapid flow of overlapping scenes and contrapuntal performances into a spiraling force with a life of its own. In the eye of this power centrifuge is Diane played by Holly Twyford in a performance that has “Yet another Helen Hays Award” written all over it. Having frequently seen Ms. Twyford in various Shakespeare productions, I knew her to be exceptionally capable, but couldn’t have foreseen the transformation here.
 
Direct as a laser, always in control, Diane’s life is the power brokering work that makes and breaks careers. She doesn’t need a whip; she’s got her slice to the heart wit and manipulative genius. Feel yourself flattered into vapor or dismissed as an “inconsequential little stain,” Diane is always running the show. (Was I the only one who was reminded of Hillary Clinton when she walked on stage?) So how does a pretty face like Mitch stand a chance?
 
Matt Montelongo gives Mitch his Marlon Brando profile and great abs, but beneath the hunk is the all too familiar budding success story who thinks that he’s entitled to his own private life of debauchery and excess. Ha-ha. Celebrities are so funny. Diane will straighten him out, just as soon as Alex gets his clothes on and disappears with Mitch’s money. She didn’t count on the mutual attraction, though. It’s impossible to pick out just one shining moment in this parade of gleaming scenes, but the partnership of Mitch and Diane schmoozing the invisible playwright must be near the top of the list.
 
Wallowing in their own tawdry illusions of life in the fast lane are Alex (Ivan Quintanilla) and Ellen (Casie Platt). While Alex, the beefy young hustler with an odd morality of his own, plays truth to Mitch’s fiction, Ellen’s store-bought hipness disintegrates before the withering comprehension of Diane. How she herds these stray cats into line with her vision of the world is just part of the story’s appeal.
 
Never intending to be generous, she nevertheless gives us some very valuable insight - for free. “Know when to shut up” she tells us, concluding an anecdote learned from her experience as a rookie agent. It’s the author’s always unpredictable splashes of truth that keep things humming.
 
Typical of his Midas touch is the scene between Diane and Alex when she seems to soften a moment, almost as if she had a heart — which she doesn’t — and leans toward him in earnestness as, with new respect for him, she begins to explain the real secret of success and happiness. The real secret is….and her cell phone rings. “I have to take this,” she says. We lean back, deflated.
 
Lee Savage’s one-stop shop scene design allows seamless scene shifts from Mitch’s bedroom to Alex’s apartment to the kind of restaurant where deals are made. Diane dominates them all except for the scene of brief male nudity which she interrupts. (Some of my readers may be offended by the nudity and some by its briefness, but I have to mention it.)
 
“The Little Dog Laughed” gives much to laugh about and even more to ponder, but it’s as bracing as a cold dip in the pool. And if it sounds like your kind of fare, see it now because — as I have regretfully had to say before — you’ll never see it in Culpeper.

Margaret Lawrence is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association. She teaches drama at CCHS.

Want to go?
What: “The Little Dog Laughed”
Where: Signature Theatre, Arlington
Call: (703) 820-9771 or visit signature-theatre.org
Extended through March 15