Sister act

Jack Neary's cartoon romance

by Anne Marie Donhue

JERRY FINNEGAN'S SISTER

Written and directed by Jack Neary. Set design by Todd P. Canedy. Lighting and sound by Benjamin M. Johnson. Costumes by Tricia Mandella. With David Mason and Kate Fitz Kelly. At the Worcester Foothills Theatre, through November 19.

Will Charlie Brown and Betty Boop ever get together? Anyone intrigued by the romantic misadventures of cartoon clowns might find something compelling in Jerry Finnegan's

Sister, Jack Neary's two-character comedy about a gutless knucklehead's 10-year struggle to ask his ditzy neighbor for a date. All other comers, however, will have to settle for the odd bits of off-beat, and occasionally hilarious, humor that crop up amid the angst and tedium in Neary's repetitious, confused, and implausible tale of undeclared amour.

Of course, Neary's play isn't really about Brown and Boop, although his characters closely resemble them. Strictly speaking, Jerry Finnegan's Sister isn't even about Jerry Finnegan's sister, a bimbo beauty named Beth. Rather, the plot centers on Jerry's best friend, Brian Dowd, who's Beth's playmate in childhood, her bratty antagonist in pre-adolescence, and her secret adorer from the time he hits his teens until, at 23, he finally works up the fortitude to pop the question: "Do you want to go out sometime?"

What elicits Brian's long overdue little query is not Beth's brickbat prompting but rather the news that someone else has just popped the big one. The morning after hearing of Beth's engagement, "I woke up galvanized," Brian tells the audience, determined to "connect with Jerry Finnegan's sister if it costs me brain death by humiliation." Before Brian has completed the first of his many monologues -- which are punctuated by flashbacks peppered with his own commentary -- he is already confused and confusing.

"I decided that if I was going to do it, I was going to do it with words," he says. "Words, it finally occurred to me, were what Beth Finnegan and I could never come to terms on. I'd throw a word in her direction and it'd be like a fried egg on Teflon." His insistence that "nothing stuck" clearly suggests that something was tossed out in the first place. But by his own repeated admissions, borne out ad nauseum in the flashbacks that follow, Brian never breathed a word to Beth about his affection in the entire 15 years he knew her.

During the first five of those years, Brian's feelings for Beth aren't particularly fond. The vexations of their early relationship, however, are both more believable and more amusing than those of their post-pubescence. In his hostile and nonsensical first encounter with little Beth, in the driveway between their abutting houses, the seven-year-old Brian responds with unequivocal disgust to his unseen mother's report that the new kid has a sister. "That stinks," he says, and then proceeds to evoke paternal authority in defense of his frankness. "Daddy says when something stinks, it stinks, and we should say it stinks.

The views of Brian's opinionated father, hilariously garbled in the 10 year-old boy's brain, crop up again in the second, and best, flashback. "My father says that the publicans are going to hell after they get out of jail for what they did to the water gate," says Brian, who explains that the publicans' plumbers stole water from the poor people of Cuba and put it in Richard Nixon's personal swimming pool, which was covered up but later leaked. After the evil "publicans" were caught while hiding out watching Deep Throat, he says, "They all went to the slammer and wrote best sellers and found Jesus. Period. End of story."

Neary's own story hurdles downhill from there. The play teeters monotonously back and forth between Brian's caustic critiques of Beth's various boyfriends and his moaning monologues about his inability to make his own bid for her amorous attentions.

Although Brian blathers on and on about how words fail him, the reasons for his reticence remain murky to the end. Beth may indeed be better looking than he is, but she drops hints as broad as the Big Dig, to no avail. Why doesn't she just ask him out? More to the point, why is Brian so unfailingly attracted to Beth? Who knows? By the end, which is funny but comes none too soon, who cares?

In the Worcester Foothills production, Kate Fitz Kelly's Beth squeaks and squeals so shrilly that it's often hard to hear what she's saying, which may be a blessing. Since she was cast and directed by the playwright himself, her overblown, cupie-doll portrayal must be seen as a reflection of Neary's wishes, not her talent. David Mason has all the good lines, and he makes the most of them. Like his character, however, Mason's performance is monotonous. Todd P. Canedy's artful set and Benjamin M. Johnson's lively and colorful lighting effects are engaging. But neither imaginative staging nor a smattering of wit can hide the stale smell of Neary's plot. If it stinks, it stinks, and we should say it stinks. Period. End of story.