I’m not sure when, where and how you might get the chance to see Dave Flebotte’s Fuck T*lk as I saw a reading of it but if it does get another airing or it gets up as a full production, go see it. It is a wonderfully talky (and I mean that in the best way) two-person play about friendship, the state of marriage and yes, even sex. I happened to sit next to Flebotte, he of T.V. writing fame (Raising Hope, Desperate Housewives, and Boardwalk Empire to name a few) and he told me this play (his first) had taken quite a few years to gestate and how he was thrilled to have The New Group presenting this reading and hopefully further workshops, then who knows?
If you have never been to a reading of a play it is quite different then seeing a play up and on its feet (I hit quite a few reading when Frog and Peach does them at the grand Players Club down off Gramercy Park in NYC) but if the words are strong enough, as they were here in Fuck T*lk then you’ll get through it with as much of an understanding of the piece (maybe even more so as the play is whittled down to its bare bones) as you might when it is playing in its fullest form; I rode the laughs and pathos of Fuck T*lk perfectly, the 2nd act actually seeing me laughing out loud and longer than the first and squirming a bit at some rather dramatic moments.
The actors here were a delight, spot on actually. Frank Wood and Mia Barron truly fleshed out the back stories of their Dan and Linda respectively, making this two hours about more than just dirty talking. But the dirty talking for me is what worked best. And not just the actual dirty talking, of which there wasn’t a lot here, just enough actually (when Barron’s Linda gets going on that by the way, she is truly incendiary, as the catalyst of play’s ‘f talking’) but what got me more was the ‘idea’ of what Dan and Linda were getting into and how it was effecting their ‘relationship’, what is the real definition of a relationship and how what exists in our heads can usually best what we do with our bodies any day. I also loved how both of these characters slowly reveal their complexities, their analogous stuck-in-life-ness, their past pains (granted Linda’s are infinitely worse than Dan’s) and Flebotte’s ruminations on the idea of beauty and what it costs women and the equal cost for men finding themselves in a time in their life when they feel they have no way out.
If Fuck T*lk does get a chance at a run you can bet I will be there but I am urging you to be as well. It is a damn good play.
