Card Boys

Publish date: 2024-08-14

The scene-change music is the best thing about "Card Boys," the debut play from 38-year-old actor-turned-writer Mike Packer that mostly packs a wallop when it gives its characters a rest and relies upon period '60s music, starting with Pete Seeger and the Beatles, to fill the silences in between. Not that the play is grim: Indeed, the tone is disconcertingly jocular given the lowlife London milieu that this comedy of wayward manners inhabits. But for all the slurs against Cat Stevens and his subsequent change in name (and persona), the sudden sounds of "Morning Has Broken" come as a welcome relief from an evening of high spirits that resembles nothing so much as a downmarket "Odd Couple" that will do anything to get a laugh.

The scene-change music is the best thing about “Card Boys,” the debut play from 38-year-old actor-turned-writer Mike Packer that mostly packs a wallop when it gives its characters a rest and relies upon period ’60s music, starting with Pete Seeger and the Beatles, to fill the silences in between. Not that the play is grim: Indeed, the tone is disconcertingly jocular given the lowlife London milieu that this comedy of wayward manners inhabits. But for all the slurs against Cat Stevens and his subsequent change in name (and persona), the sudden sounds of “Morning Has Broken” come as a welcome relief from an evening of high spirits that resembles nothing so much as a downmarket “Odd Couple” that will do anything to get a laugh.

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The “card boys” of the title are the quasi-pimps and their often hapless employees who trawl central London — often for as much as six to seven miles a day — sticking up advertisements in pay phones for prostitutes: the sort of free enterprise endeavor that Rudy Giuliani’s squeaky-clean Manhattan would never allow. On the evidence of the robust, seemingly very centered Kath (Suzan Sylvester, the highlights in her hair constituting the most singular design element of Anthony Lamble’s pliable set), the hookers themselves are in fine form; it’s the men in their orbit who need urgent attention.

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That list is headed by the implausibly named Plato (Albie Woodington) — his actual name, we learn, is Ian — an unlikely romantic who wants to chuck in society’s seamier calling as part of the skin trade in favor of starting up a marijuana farm in the English countryside. Plato is the pregnant Kath’s intended , or would be, if he weren’t prone to impotence. But the character gets far more stage time with the dissolute, booze-soaked Teddy (Willie Ross), an older man who looks fried beyond his years and boasts his own legacy from hippie days during “the summer of fuckin’ love” in a daughter (unseen) and the sense that this salty-tongued alcoholic probably hasn’t bathed since 1968.

Teddy joins Plato in his rural retreat, but that idyll proves all too short-lived, especially once Plato botches his dope-growing scheme and turns into a pothead variant of Tevye — a troubled man asking the Divinity for miracles — in time for the final curtain. (If God didn’t exist, surely playwrights would have had to invent Him.) Before that come enough repetitions of a vulgarism for the female genitalia to put even “Closer” to shame, alongside dual impulses toward the scabrously funny and the maudlin that never coalesce.

Packer’s origins as a performer are mightily evident, given his fondness for supposedly actor-friendly set pieces at whatever the price. But though the play has a cast of six — the ever-lively Di Botcher is seen all too briefly as a willing brothel-keeper of sorts — Teddy and Plato inevitably take center stage , and director Simon Usher might have been more scrupulous about seeing that the actors in those roles don’t take over the production. As Plato, Woodington brings a Nick Nolte-ish hangdog feel of dishevelment to a man whose apparent brutality doesn’t prevent him from musing on the “sunflower” that is the heart.

Ross’ Teddy cuts so vivid an image of misanthropic disenfranchisement that one would cross the street to avoid his real-life equivalent. The theater, though, doesn’t permit such options, which could explain why the performance gets more shamelessly overbearing (no matter how much the audience laps it up) as the show goes along. Stringy-haired, dressed in battered jeans, an unsteady pyramid of beer cans a testament to his no less steady self, the performer is unerringly convincing except where it matters most — in an appeal to the heart instead of to a house that may be as dismayed by his usurpation of the play as it is drawn to the type of verisimilitude one enters the theater to leave behind.

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Card Boys

(COMEDY-DRAMA; BUSH THEATER; 105 SEATS; $:10 ($ 16.25) TOP)

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