Get pulled along with bursts of comic ecstasy

One evening, secrets are revealed, dreams are realized, and hopes are dashed. Richard Aglow is a failure. A once-promising playwright, he finds himself a virtual shut-in with only rejection letters to amuse himself. Until today. He's started writing again!

And so starts OKC’s Carpenter Square Theatre production of The Agony & The Agony, a comedy by Nicky Silver. Silver wrote it after he decided to “leave the theater” because he was depressed.

He wrote, “In the spring of 2004, I felt defeated. I don’t want to sound silly. I know how lucky I am. I get to earn a living doing something I adore… But that knowledge didn’t help at the time. I was depressed.

“Then, one day I decided if I was going to ‘leave the theater,’ I didn’t want it to be with a sour taste in my mouth. And so I wrote The Agony & The Agony. I was intended to be a lark, something to amuse myself and remind me that it’s all supposed to be fun.

“And though the facts of Richard’s life don’t resemble my own, he’s a clear representation of how I was feeling about my place in the theatrical landscape at the time.”

So, to translate reality into theatre, The Agony & The Agony was born. Richard’s life took a turn. And as luck would have it, inspiration has hit on the very day his wife, Lela, an aspiring actress who married Richard despite his homosexuality, has met one of New York's leading producers.

This is Richard's chance, a golden opportunity to get back in the game. Of course, he'll have to overlook the fact that the producer is the man who wrote that last rejection, the one that broke Richard's spirit. The arrival of Lela's lover, the lover’s pregnant girlfriend and the ghost of Nathan Leopold, one of the twentieth century's most notorious killers, complicate matters further.

Leopold, who was at the center of a notorious 1920s murder planned as the ‘perfect crime’, “is not at all happy to have his likeness invoked in Richard’s self-referential new play,” according to critic Carolyn Hayes, writing in the blog Rogue Critic.

She continues, “The Agony & the Agony delivers on its promised anguish, but only for its characters; the audience is pulled along with curiosity, bafflement, and bursts of comic ecstasy. The script's framework is marvelous, taking the hokey literary device ‘and that is what you juuuust read’ and unceremoniously dropping it on its head, but the snarling logic of the premise never once trips up or interferes with the precision train wreck that drives the story.”

"The Agony & The Agony is proof, once and for all, that hard work, grit and determination almost compensate for a total lack of talent." —Jill Silver (the playwright's mother).

Ronn Burton directs the cast of theatrical misfits with Jon Haque starring as Richard, the struggling playwright, Christine Lanning as his wife and struggling actress, Alex Prather as the ghost of Nathan Leopold, Dylan Cox as a porn “actor” whose big dream is to play a horse in “Equus.”

Tiffany Tuggle Rogers is his pregnant girlfriend who demands he give up his theater dreams, and Mark Ingham is a New York producer who once gave Richard his most scathing rejection letter. Ben Hall is in charge of the set, with Jay C. Schardt as lighting designer, and Rhonda Clark as costume designer.

Take in this delightfully complex comedy at Oklahoma City’s Carpenter Square Theatre. The play continues July 1-2, 7-9, and 14-16, at the theatre’s new location, 800 W. Main St., in downtown OKC.

Tickets are available by phone at (405) 232-6500 (their online purchase system does not currently work, according to the box office). Tickets are $20 for adults, $15 for seniors 62 and older, and $10 on Thursday nights, July 7 and 14.

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