Review: Messy, mushy script musses up Poetry

It’s hard to buy “The Poetry of Pizza.” 

Playwright Deborah Bre­voort has apparently never met a rewrite person with whom she could work – including her inner self. She has within her grasp a play that could, perhaps, be funny while it comments on world issues, cultural differences, loneliness and the pomposity of academia . Instead, she touches all these bases but offers two hours of filler material about love at first sight.

Billed as “romantic farce,” it is a reminder that a comedy of errors has to provide some believable errors . The script is shallow and superficial, even for its fluffy genre.

Lonely, middle aged American women who go to Europe have been the stuff of romantic fantasy for generations. Think Katharine Hepburn in “Summertime” (1955) or Suzanne Pleshette in “Rome Adventure” (1962) or Diane Lane in “Under the Tuscan Sun” (2003).

It is not by coincidence that these three titles were movies rather than theater plays, because such emotionalism is easier to portray in Technicolor close-up than to project past the second row. It is not surprising that Brevoort first conceived of “Pizza” as a screenplay. She should have stuck with her original instinct, or, better still, given up.

In what is the token “lighthearted comedy” in  Virginia Stage Company’s 29th season, “Pizza” has a 44-year-old woman college professor falling in love with a 10-years-younger pizza chef in Denmark. He is an illiterate Kurdish refugee who walked from Iraq to Copenhagen. He mistakes her for a rose when she is standing in the rain beneath her red umbrella. He promptly creates sexy pizzas for her, giving them titles like Persian Kisses, Arabian Nights and Purple Passion. (The latter is “made with eggplant, soft white cheese and looks like a flower.”) He calls her “my flower.” She collects 28 uneaten exmples of his pizzas in her apartment – a health, if not heart, hazard.

We’re ready to rejoice in their joy, but the messy, mushy script creates flimsy obstacles to pad the play to a full-length evening.

The cast works hard. Denise Cormier, though, is miscast in the role of the  schoolmarm – a part that is so contradictory that it would be difficult for anyone to play for either logic or appeal. You want to have sympathy for a lonely woman who has spent her life writing things like “Poetic Esthetics Beyond Linguistic Signification,” but before she can become an underdog , she jumps in the sack with the pizza cook for two weeks at a time – slurping down figs in a scene of embarrassingly overstated eroticism.

Rather than a lonely misfit, she just may be a slut. We have reason to wonder. After all, two other men are panting after her – one a married old coot and the other a wolf of a college prof. You wonder how she could have lived such a supposedly cloistered life back in the States.

The supporting players are caricatures . Her landlady (Maria Cellario) is  a busybody who turns into a pathetic vamp midway (and gets the biggest laughs simply by mugging and wiggling a bit). Inga, the wronged wife (Susan Greenhill), suffers from agoraphobia and hasn’t been out of her house for years. Now her husband is chasing the poor American professor about, thinking, inconceivably, that she comes to the pizza parlor because she’s attracted to him rather than to the young chef.

John FitzGibbon is fine in the role of the old fool, even if the part is written in  a way that makes him seem more like a quirky stalker than a misguided romantic.

Also fine, almost good enough to save the shallow romance, is Barzin Akhavan as the pizza chef. He brings an innocence and a love for love to the part that makes us wish the best for his character.

Local actor Joel King, who did yeoman’s work in Generic Theater’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” brings presence and ease to the underwritten part of the  professor who also pants for the American female visitor.

 Most offensive is the play’s refusal to make anything of the cultural differences between the Kurd refugee and the American educator. Curiously, and tastelessly, the only real difference mentioned involves the use of a razor. This, as well as talk of the horrors of starvation and such, are trotted out in the second act, as if from another, more important play. We never do, thankfully, learn  whether a razor was used.

Patrick Mullins had the thankless task of trying to get some thigh-slapping laughs out of this mixed bag. His direction  manages some well-timed comic ideas . (The pizza thrower from backstage could well enter this year’s Olympics.)  

A. Nelson Ruger IV’s set is attractive but overdone in an apparent effort to make this small play look like a big production. It looks more Asian than Danish, but maybe that is by design.

One comes away with the idea that both poetry and pizza are overrated.    

mal.vincent@pilotonline.com