Successful comedy relies on crackerjack timing. Sudden spit-takes. Excruciating slow burns. Perfect pauses between set-ups and punchlines. The program for Theatre Rhinoceros' production of "Oedipus at Palm Springs" says that the one-act show runs approximately 90 minutes. The opening-night performance last Saturday clocked in at about 110 minutes. Seen in slow motion, someone slipping on a banana peel is more painful than humorous.
The 2005 play, written and originally performed by the Five Lesbian Brothers collaborative (Maureen "Mo" Angelos, Babs Davy, Dominique Dibbell, Peg Healey and Lisa Kron), is particularly reliant on the performers' delivery rather than the plot's details. The show's title itself is a spoiler.
It hardly takes a Nostradamus - or even a Joni (played here by AJ Davenport), the soothsaying caretaker at the lesbian couples' resort where the play unfolds - to know where things are going. It's an all-female twist on Greek myth, and by the end of the show, one of the drama's two central couples, Prin (Elaine Jennings) and Terri (Jensen Power), will discover that, in addition to being lovers, they are biological mother and daughter.
The comedy here needs to be brisk and black. Instead, it's slow and slack. Even within its brief 10-day run, this production could be dramatically improved if director Kathryn L. Wood pushed her cast for more rat-a-tat dialogue in the evening's sluggish first two-thirds.
Its current slow-as-molasses pacing allows audiences to notice other time warps on stage. Crew members are downright languorous in rearranging props and furniture during between-scenes blackouts. (The audience actually laughed when, in the midst of setting a table, a stagehand slow-grinded to an interstitial audio clip of Beyonce's "Baby Boy.")
And somehow, in the flip-phone mid-1990s when the action is set, one of the main characters' vacation reading is the script to "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," published in 2017.
There are two cursed children in "Oedipus at Palm Springs." First there's Terri, a 37-year-old adoptee bereft from the death of her adoptive mother and hoping that finding her birth mother will provide a sense of wholeness. And then there's Basil, the off-stage toddler son of the play's bickering second couple, 40something Fran (Eliza Gibson) and Con (Desiree Rogers), whose lives have also been upturned by Mommy Issues.
Fran and Con's often-vicious criticism of each other and their shared "lesbian bed death" bring to mind the poisoned repartee of Edward Albee's couples. One wonders how their son, still breast-feeding at three, will turn out.
The Five Lesbian Brothers' script brings wit and insight to the cross-hatched issues of these women's relationships: What is the difference between being mothering and being a mother? Where are the boundaries between friendship and intimacy? And the writers' frank, funny dialogue about sex is refreshing for its lack of coyness and romanticization.
The four key cast members display notable individual strengths: Rogers makes Con irrefutably seductive. Gibson's Fran believably transforms as she begins to drink heavily. Power is affecting in her desperation to please. Jennings' Elaine is at first a cranky delight, then a gut-wrenching tragic figure.
But the cast struggles to make their onstage conversations and interpersonal chemistry feel genuine. Granted, "Oedipus at Palm Springs" was originally written and performed by a close-knit group of friends, intimately familiar with each other's verbal styles and thought patterns. Still, their efforts also yielded a solid, provocative and very funny script.
Challenging and unorthodox, finding humor in even its darkest moments, "Oedipus at Palm Springs" is rarely produced. So just for mounting it, Theater Rhinoceros deserves praise. But in comedy, timing is everything, and this production should provide audiences with a better time than it does.
"Oedipus at Palm Springs" plays through July 22. Theatre Rhinoceros, Gateway Theater, 215 Jackson St., SF. www.therhino.org