Theater review part deux: Dilemmas with Dinner at Cox Building Playhouse in Plano

by Carol Anne Gordon of John Garcia's The Column

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The cast is a cohesive ensemble that meets and tops each other's patter, keeping the audience in stitches.

Ah, the '80s. The "Me Decade." The dawn of The Yuppies. And the first serious entry of women into corporate America's workplace, where their shoulder-padded boxy power suits and heavily-moussed hair slammed right into the glass ceiling.

In Dilemmas with Dinner, Rover Dramawerks has produced a terrifically accurate, and hilarious, slice-of-'80s-life in the Cox Building Playhouse (playing through August 7). As you enter the theatre, Director/Sound Designer Anton Bucher's selection of '80s golden oldies already has people bouncing their heads to the beat and mouthing the words.

Then you count the doors onstage and realize – A-Ha! (that was a band from the '80s, btw) – this time warp set, designed by Charis Royal and accurately outfitted by Properties Designer Kelly Williams, is setting us up for a farce! Nonstop madcap slapstick! Over-the-top physical comedy! Clever word play!

A tall order, and not an easy one to achieve, especially when (as the character Donny says) you're not speaking with an English accent and sipping on brandy. Timing is critical, and speed (which increases as the show moves along) is of the essence. One dropped cue can cause a train wreck that most casts can't recover from. I'm happy to report that this amazing cast, which ranges in age from someone who wasn't born till after the '80s all the way up to someone who might have become a grandfather in the '80s, is a cohesive ensemble that meets and tops each other's patter, keeping the audience in stitches.

The first act clocked in at exactly an hour, but felt like it was only 20 minutes long. (I wonder if Director Anton Bucher made the cast rehearse to the ever-escalating beat of a metronome?) The evening flies by in hilarity. The entire play takes place in the home of Yuppie (Young Upwardly Mobile Professional Person) Dinky (Double Income No Kids Yet) couple Brooke and Donny.

Brooke has suddenly sprung a formal dinner party on poor Donny, during which she plans to impress her Woopee (Well Off Older People) Jollie (Jet Setting Oldsters with Lots of Loot) boss Will and his airhead wife Louise. Brooke's hired a caterer and enlisted the help of her peers Julia and Stephen to make the evening a success. But woebegone Donny was injured at work by an accident-waiting-to-happen Max, who shows up to apologize and then gets sucked into the maelstrom that the disastrous dinner party has become.

The costumes designed Joslyn Justus were letter perfect to the era – especially those of the three yuppie women, who looked like they'd just stepped out of a Pat Benatar music video on MTV (BTW, in the '80s, MTV played music!)

The whole cast did such a great job that it's hard to single out individual performances, but Howard Korn's deadpan and non-hesitating deliveries of his malapropisms and Mary Tiner's space cadet food inhaling deserve special mention. Beauen Bogner's side-splitting portrayal of a painfully injured man reached new levels of physical comedy.

Cassie Walters, as Brooke, believably captures the frustration of many ambitious young women in the '80s, who were working just as hard – actually harder, usually – as their male counterparts, and "dressed for success" (in outfits that made them look like vertical rectangles and blouses with giant floppy bows that hid their upper body curves), but still had to suffer the indignity of being referred to as "girls." But also being passed over for well-deserved promotions (I'm not bitter, BTW). Walters starts out as a typically frantic hostess, and ramps up her performance as she desperately tries to salvage her chances for a raise and a title, until she achieves a very satisfying resolution in the last few minutes of the show.

The performance I attended was sold out, and word-of-mouth about such an uproarious show is sure to spread fast, especially since the content is family-friendly. There are only six performances left, so I recommend you get your tickets soon!

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