Erotic Adventures in Venice

If the prolific and lauded playwright Mario Fratti (adapter of Fellini's film "81/2" that became Nine, the Broadway musical) has secured a solid international standing for his satiric considerations of serious subjects (Cage, Suicide, Victim, Che Guevara), the plays of his that I have seen suggest to me that Americans may not be tuned in to the specific and possibly too-subtle ironies that propel Fratti's largely political and socially-conscious work. It is also possible that Fratti has yet to find a local director or a cast that can interpret and deliver his texts in a way that don't seem naive and indecisive.

In Erotic adventures in Venice, Fratti draws upon a political scandal that was exposed in Italy during 1991-92. Know as Tangentopoli, or Bribestown, it involved the indictment of many corrupt politicians. Some of the indicted ran away. Others, it seems, took refuge in family mausoleums (apparently true).

The setting of Fratti's play is the well-known Venetian cemetery of San Michele, wherein are the tombs of such famous people as Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Ezra Pound. That the serene and beautiful location was a perfect spot for an amusing and profitable sex business for tourists, who would pay for hanky panky among the ghosts, certainly gives one pause to ponder the comic possibilities. Unfortunately, pondering does not make it so. Guido (Mika Duncan), a good-looking young saxophone player-cum-boy toy for an American tourist, has returned to his native Italy after three and-a-half kept years in America. Duncan, who actually plays the sax for us with a modicum of aplomb, has a winning presence. He gets a more gainful job, however, as a custodian at St. Michele, where he takes notice of the bizarre sexual preferences and proclivities of its visitors, and in particular a young couple, played by Ross Stoner and Jennifer Herzog. They make regular visits to the tomb of his mother, where they rendezvous and hatch a devious plot. The only son of a millionaire, he and his girlfriend devise a plan to kill his old man in a most bizarre fashion. The eccentric father has had a phone installed in the tomb with the hope that his wife will seek to communicate with him. After practicing her boyfriend's mother's voice, the girlfriend calls the father on the phone. He promptly dies of a heart attack.

Shades of TV Hitchcock, the humor is decidedly black but without much bite. The next scene involves a crooked senator (played by Dave DeChristopher) who books the mausoleum for a month and delivers a long speech justifying the time-honored tradition of bribes and kickbacks. He also enjoys the visits of a dim manicurist (Zenobia Shroff) and an aggressive masseuse (Caroline Strong). The payoff here eluded me. In the final scene, Guido and his attractive wife (Strong) have turned the mausoleum, which they have made their home, into a thriving sex operation with an emphasis on erotic and kinky encounters. The denouement finds the senator returning to make a play for Guido's sexy wife while the young couple, having squandered their inheritance, return to the mausoleum permanently.

Sounds promising, but director Dan Friedman doesn't know how far to take the farcical elements in the play, or how much absurdist behavior to encourage in his actors as they proceed from one ludicrous moment to the next. I can't help thinking that Fratti has more to say than actually finds its way to the audience. Despite its mausoleum setting, a livelier staging would have helped. Like the other formidable Italian playwright Dario Fo, Fratti needs a production that isn't afraid to be more boldly outlandish and irreverently shocking. Certainly with a title like it has, playgoers have a right to expect more titillation than talk. Modest production values offer basic support.