Locked and Loaded, now in its extended West-Coast premiere, is a profane, bawdy and irreverent riff on mortality. Written by veteran actor Todd Susman, the play stars Paul Linke and Andrew Parks as two old geezers with terminal illnesses who decide to end their life with a bang -- pun intended, we quickly learn. They check into a hotel room, gorge themselves with food and booze, put out a call for a couple of hookers. The Linke character -- Irwin Schimmel, a foul-mouthed ex-comedy writer -- has secreted a pistol in his suitcase. The weapon, he explains, is to be pressed into action just in case the whiskey and the babes fail to kill them. Who is to shoot first, then turn the gun on himself is never discussed.
Locked and Loaded isn't the kind of play that makes much realistic sense. Either you accept its mad logic and laugh along unthinkingly with it, or you are turned off completely by it. In my case, I decided to suspend disbelief and go with the comic flow. It helped that Linke and his cohort, Dickie Rice (an uptight WASP played by Andrew Parks), made a good vaudeville team, with Rice as straight man and Schimmel as jokester. The story also gets a big boost from the hookers when they arrived: Terasa Sciortino as the Latina bombshell, Catorce Martinez; and Tarina Pouncy as Princess Lay-Ya. These politically incorrect caricatures have a trick up their sleeves (no pun intended this time). Both, you see, are really angels sent down from heaven to remind the geezers, through word and action, that life is indeed worth living. Frank Capra would have loved this one.
