The Little Dog Laughed

At the beginning of Douglas Carter Beane's quirky, heartbreaking play "The Little Dog Laughed," now playing at Brooklyn's Gallery Players in Park Slope, hard-as-nails entertainment industry professional Diane (Maeve Yore) rhapsodizes at the beautiful beginning of the film, "Breakfast at Tiffany's."

Audrey Hepburn is beautiful in her up do, walking into the iconic jewelers, her pearls shimmering, and beautifully evil in evading her lecherous client; even beautiful entering her dingy apartment building and coddling her mangy cat. Everything is beautiful, says Diane, until racist Mickey Rooney arrives in his Hirohito glasses and terrible Chinese accent, to put an end to all beauty.

The struggle at the heart of "The Little Dog Laughed" is a lot like this. Diane's client Mitchell (Brian W. Seibert), is a Hollywood leading man struck with "a light, recurring case of homosexuality." When he falls in love with rent boy Alex (Jake Mendes), Mitchell must decide between personal happiness and fame.

The beautiful beginning is a fortuitous accident; a drunk Mitchell, (looking a lot like Colin Farrell, sans the crazy eyes), calls a hustler from Manhattan Schoolboys. Alex appears, looking like a poor man's Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but Mitchell falls asleep.

Thinking at first to roll him and leave, Alex is touched by Mitchell's childlike slumber, and stays, bringing Mitchell breakfast. Neither man is wholly comfortable with the move, but both seem to realize that some spark exists between them.

Alex returns to his erstwhile girlfriend Ellen, (Tania Verafield), a Westchester-bred beauty who has just been dumped by her much-older boyfriend Arthur.

"We're 24; hope is dead," says Ellen, unknowingly prescient.

But the heart wants what the heart wants, and Mitchell soon calls Alex back for round two. The two spent much time assuring each other that they are not gay -- their shared self-denial ironically being the thing that draws each to the other.

After brushing aside comments about early sexual abuse at the hands of his stepfather, Alex tells of his first trick, who treated him a fancy dinner, told him he was magnificent, then pissed on him.

Mitchell goes back to his "last time, back in Boy Scouts...the merit badge that dares not speak its name." He views his attraction to men as a crippling force, "desires that you know if you pursue them, the whatever you want in life will be destroyed."

Before long, Alex and Mitchell are bare-ass naked and ready to get down to business; cue an ill-timed interruption from Diane. After all, she has invested seven years of her life into Mitchell, a man whose "dream is to be everyone's dream," and she has no intention to see her work destroyed by a "twinkie-fuck."

"Butch it up, Mary," spits Diane as she and Mitchell prepare to meet with a gay playwright in an effort to buy his hit play and turn it into a blockbuster hit, with Mitchell as the leading man. The playwright asks Diane to give him her word that the gay angle won't be changed.

"I want your word? You're asking a whore for her cherry," muses Diane, a savvy character who delivers some of the play's best lines.

"You have my word as a gay man," says an emboldened Mitchell; a gambit that works.

Back at the hotel, Alex comes to tell Mitchell that he has discovered he is a famous actor. "Do you want to blackmail me, or be a movie star yourself," ask Mitchell. "Fuck you. I wanted you to know that no one would know," replies Alex.

The anger only fuels the heat between the two men, both tenuously exploring their own sexuality within a same-sex relationship for the first time. They end up spending day after day in bed, each struggling with the growing chemistry they feel, and the implications that brings with it. Can Mitchell have happiness and fame, he wonders? Will he ask Alex to stop hustling and be with him, Alex wonders?

Diane goes back to L.A. to talk up the movie. The playwright, incensed over Diane's efforts to rewrite the evil female role into a love interest and downplay the gay angle, incites bad press.

Back in New York, Ellen has discovered Alex's secret, and has one of her own; she is pregnant with his baby and needs money for an abortion. Alex goes to Mitchell for help, and in his panic, he calls to Diane, who "solves problems."

Mitchell tries to find a way that he can have a "special friend" and be a Hollywood star. "Are you British? Are you knighted? Then shut up!" Diane replies. She has her own savvy solution: Mitchell will marry Ellen, putting him in the category of "the straight man that plays the gay role, like the pretty woman who wears the ugly plastic nose."

Alex can stick around as the "personal assistant," and help raise his baby, and as long as everyone keeps quiet, everyone can be happy. "That's how one wins, by shutting up," says Mitchell.

This plan works great for everyone involved -- except Alex. Unable to close off a part of him that Mitchell has opened, he takes the check offered by Diane and leaves New York for parts unknown, happier to disappear into the landscape than live a lie.

Beane's fast-moving, poignant tale of self-discovery is blessed with excellent timing, meaty roles, and scene-chewing dialogue. The fourth wall is broken down in a way far less jarring than classic asides, and while the humor quotient is off the charts, the story still manages to be heartbreaking.

Cynical Diane's early assessment of the situation as transitory bears out, and in the end, wraps up as easily as a fairy tale, as "the little dog laughed to see such sport, and the bowl ran away with the spoon."