Mike Klar is a co-Artistic Director of Kids with Guns, a theater company he founded with collaborator Ben Cikanek in 2005. In 2008 he directed “The Night Carter was Bad“, in ‘07 he directed “An Octopus Love Story” and in ‘05,  “Conference Room A“. Mike and Ben have been producing theater in NYC since 2003 including the 2006 Fringe Festival and Fringe Encore Series productions of “The Blue Martini”. Mike has a BFA from the University of Delaware in Visual Communications.

Meet Delaney Britt Brewer, the playwright behind our upcoming (August 2010) production of Wolves at 59E59 Theaters. Delaney also penned our critically acclaimed 2007 production of An Octopus Love Story. A KwG company member since 2006, Brewer is also a veteran of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood program.

Probably the hardest thing about writing any kind of fiction is maintaining integrity throughout the work — integrity of tone, a consistent world, and — on the stage — characters who become real people before our eyes even though we are in the extraordinarily artificial setting of the theater.

The four characters in Ben Cikanek’s new comedy come alive for us, rooted in the script but thanks also to solid, sometimes superb, acting and Mike Klar’s wise direction. Storywise, Cikanek isn’t concerned with giving us anything particularly new — this is a modern romance about two men and two women who simply want love and happiness. However, his particular gifts for dialogue and character development give this talky play a consistent and compelling voice.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Nathaniel, who is gay, suggests hooking up his friend Charlie, who is female, with his straight roommate, Carter, who is volatile, and, tonight, very drunk. (Got that?) Instead, Carter brings home Annie, whom he’s just met. Cut to two years later: Annie’s moved in with the boys, but Carter’s working long hours and neglecting her. Meanwhile, Charlie’s even more alone and uncertain about herself than before.

The story veers between borderline-campy comedy and focused drama, but the transitions are smooth, and it all (or nearly all) works because the characters rapidly become entertaining, clever, and “real” people we enjoy spending time with, despite — or rather because of — their flaws. It’s a good thing, too, because in tiny Theater C at the 59E59 Theaters complex, we’re truly up close and personal with the cast.

Carter has commitment problems. That’s the standard male character flaw of our age of course, but the handsome, wiry actor, Kurt Rodeghiero, makes him a compelling, even sympathetic, bastard. Little touches, like his odd mispronunciation of his roommate’s name, and his difficulty remembering Charlie’s, help fill out his three dimensions.

Carter’s exchanges with Annie resound with true-life anguish, and that’s half because of Rachel Jordan Brown, who plays Annie with a whininess that starts out annoying but proves a useful springboard for the explosive later development of her character.

She’s also both sexy and funny, and that brings us to Nathaniel. Tom Baran plays the roommate with sly humor, making the most of his character’s broad physicality and relatively limited opportunity for development. Most important, he makes us laugh — a lot.

Finally, Ginny Myers Lee handles the key role of Charlie with wit and pathos, though, like Nathaniel, she’s a little more caricatured than Carter and Annie – in her case, as the smart but flighty twentysomething.

One or two scenes go on a touch too long, and one or two backstory plot points are a little unclear, but overall, the intermissionless 100 minutes go by breezily. The only sour note is a little burst of overly poetic language that comes after the two big monologues in the climactic window-ledge scene. (It’s a rule: any play that takes place in New York City and concerns ungrounded, single people approaching thirty has to include a window-ledge scene, otherwise it can’t get a development grant.) The over-the-top verbiage sticks out like a sore big toe from a play that otherwise maintains its integrity of tone so admirably.

Review by Jon Sobel for Blogcritics. Published on October 02, 2008 at 5:57 pm.

What happens to a sensitive straight man who is unmarried and 30? What happens when you “don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone”? How do you survive when you have boxed yourself into relationship situations that you aren’t sure you want, but you cannot see your way out of? And why do women occasionally sleep with gay men? The Night Carter Was Bad, written by the talented Ben Cikanek, tackles these questions and more in this Dinner With Friends-ish piece about romantic struggles in the Big Apple. Life mismanagement and a quarterlife crisis collide in this sexy and winning new comedy/drama, directed with vigor by Mike Klar and produced by the gutsy troupe Kids With Guns, and now playing at Theater C at 59E59.

I call Kids With Guns “gutsy” simply because under normal circumstances, the phrase “relationship dramedy” sends most folks I know running for the hills. And for good reason—who wants to watch a bunch of twenty/thirtysomethings whine about their unhappiness for two hours? But happily, Cikanek and Klar keep the tone of the play breezy and light during the proceedings and mine The Night Carter Was Bad for tons of laughs throughout. Cikanek has written a clever, smart script that never talks down to its audience and spins just enough twists to keep us engaged without getting lost or being too improbable. The Night Carter Was Bad is a grounded, real piece that generates a real empathy between the audience and the characters.

It certainly helps to have a terrific cast, led by the rogue-in-question Carter (a charming Kurt Rodeghiero) who is stuck in a tough live-in relationship with his needy girlfriend Annie (played with baby-doll pout by Rachel Jordan Brown). His gay roommate Nathaniel (a rousingly funny Tom Baran) keeps prodding his dancer friend Charlie (the disarming Ginny Myers Lee) to seduce Carter out of his bad relationship. Carter, it seems, is prone to having “bad nights” where he breaks out of his normal good-guy persona and chases another woman for an evening, only to always return to his relationship. It’s a pattern he can’t seem to break, and somehow he’s always managed to talk himself (and others) into accepting it. Charlie, by evening’s end, seems primed to break through his cyclical behavior by reminding Carter who he is at his core. That’s assuming, of course, that Carter can accept Charlie’s flaws, battle his own demons, leave Annie behind, and get over the strange relationship between Charlie and Nathaniel.

I can’t say enough good things about the unities of this production. The Night Carter Was Bad is living proof that the details in a story, as in at least one monologue from each character, can make old plotlines feel new and fresh. The sophistication of Cikanek’s writing and Klar’s direction adds oomph in unexpected places and pushes the piece past some of its more soap opera-y moments and into deeper, psychological territory. The cast ropes you in, charms you, turns you on your head, and sends you out the door wondering how Carter’s life will turn out. I highly recommend you go see for yourself what happens after The Night Carter Was Bad.

Review by Josh Sherman for nytheatre.com on October 1, 2008.

Quirky allegory in the theater can be charming, and Delaney Britt Brewer uses the device beautifully in An Octopus Love Story. In this play about how we can sometimes deny our instincts in pursuit of companionship, the playwright includes a fanciful tale of a sea creature that crawls out of a marine biologist’s tank. The main plot involves Danny (Josh Tyson) and Jane (Kelli Holsopple), a gay man and a lesbian who tie the knot as a publicity stunt to protest the ban on same-sex marriage.

It’s a clever setup for this comedy of manners, directed with gentle buoyancy by Mike Klar, even if, like Brewer, he stumbles occasionally—particularly in the portrayal of the two public-relations flacks (including Jane’s lover) who conceive the mock-marriage. More successful are two characters that could be caricatures: an evangelical reporter (Andrew Dawson) who interviews the “happy couple” and Jane’s beauty-queen stepmom (Krista Sutton). The production’s best moments, though, belong to Danny and Jane, appealingly rendered by Tyson and Holsopple. These are characters of enormous pluck and charm. In fact, they almost seem like a 21st-century equivalent of Rock Hudson and Doris Day. As their friendship grows, they start to resemble that lonely octopus, reaching out a tentacle for contact. — Andy Propst

Jane (Kelli Holsopple) is so insecure she leaves the lights on when she goes out “so everything’s how I remember it when I get back.” Desperate for assurance, she leads on a smitten male co-worker (Eric Kuehnemann) even though she has a live-in lover, the arrogant Tosh (Jenny Greer). Tosh is so controlling she won’t even let Jane indulge her taste for guilty pleasure movies and comfort food. (“She caught me once, on a Cactus Flower and Tater Tot night.”) Lacking confidence, Jane puts up with the emotional abuse.

Meanwhile, Danny (Josh Tyson), a sweet-natured, gauntly handsome waiter, has far too little ambition to satisfy his old friend Alex (Michael Cyril Creighton), who also happens to be Tosh’s partner at a public relations firm. Danny toys with the idea of graduate school, without a clear idea of what he might want to study. But the two PR pros have cooked up a novel plan for the shiftless Jane and Danny, who have never met: have them get married while publicly avowing their homosexuality, thereby calling attention to the absurdity of laws that grant two opposite-sex strangers the benefits of marriage while denying the same benefits to a loving, committed same-sex couple.

If I were writing about a sitcom, the next sentence would naturally be: “Hilarity ensues.” But playwright Delaney Britt Brewer has serious things to say here, though they’re not the ones you might expect. Speckled with funny moments and clever dialogue, the play is fundamentally about how unexpected, and how unstorybooklike, love can be. With its topical plot, flawed and fully realized characters, and direction as smooth and transparent as glass, it is both timely and universal.

Unafraid of controversy, Brewer digs into the complexities of emotions and gay identity. As Jane and Danny develop mutual affection, Alex – whose own feelings for Danny may be deeper than he has let on – lashes out at his friend for betraying the cause. But how much is love responsible for the plan’s backfiring, and how much is it Alex and Tosh’s just desserts for manipulating their friends for a “higher” cause? Danny finds the guts to defend himself: “Don’t try to stop it because it doesn’t fit your image. That would be the ultimate malevolence.”

Tosh, too, may have had a hidden motive for the arrangement, besides the political protest. Touting her Ivy League and Mensa credentials while committing malapropisms (“I’m glad you two have endeavored such a close friendship”), she proves in the end – as Danny tells a heartbroken Jane – “pathetic,” if entertainingly so from our standpoint.

The central image that gives the play its name is emblematic of Brewer’s ability to merge higher concepts with slightly elevated but believable dialogue. Jane tells Danny that, like the animal of the title, “I climbed out of the tank…to be with you,” knowing it wasn’t an environment she could live in. “If I could find another octopus in the tank…I would choose that over you.” The flowering of Jane’s courage, and to a lesser extent Danny’s, forms the backbone of the story, and Holsopple’s bravura performance locks it all together, with more than able counterbalance from Tyson and excellent performances from Creighton and Greer, both of whom make the most of their scenes.

The supporting cast also includes Krista Sutton as Jane’s stepmother, a former beauty queen who reveals an unexpected richness of character while representing the essential goodness of the human heart, and Andrew Dawson as a creepy fundamentalist bigot who is nonetheless – like the play – disturbingly smart and human.

Review by Jon Sobel for Blogcritics Culture. Published May 06, 2007 at 11:48 am.

An Octopus Love Story

by Kerri Allen

May 5, 2007

Just when you thought Neil Simon had no descendent in the 21st century, along comes Delaney Britt Brewer. Her snappy new comedy, An Octopus Love Story, is one of the most accessible and genuinely funny shows to hit downtown in quite a while.

Subsisting on good old-fashioned humor, the play opens with two co-workers at dinner bitching about the office. Marc, played by a goofy Eric Kuehnemann (who, sadly, appears only in this scene), is trying to woo Jane, the lovely office secretary. Trouble is, she’s a lesbian. Their conversation is quick and easy and has the entire audience laughing within a minute.

Jane lives with her girlfriend, the overbearing and pretentious Tosh (Jenny Greer), who works at a P.R. firm with Alex (Michael Cyril Creighton), a snappy gay man. Tosh and Alex devise a plan for a protest-cum-media blitz: Jane will wed Alex’s best friend, Danny (Josh Tyson). Since Danny is gay, this — the P.R. pair hopes — will expose the hypocrisy behind the opposition to same-sex-marriage legislation in New York. But their plan sinks when their guinea pigs unexpectedly fall for each other.

Beautiful Kelli Holsopple plays the rootless heroine — unhappy at work and denigrated at home. She flips between Brewer’s comedic and dramatic moments with ease and tackles both with equal talent. The other comedic hero is Creighton’s Alex, always bespectacled and with a necktie, who drolly delivers lines like, “You won’t just marry any woman — you will marry a woman of the Sapphic ilk, the cargo-pant oeuvre.”

While the play lacks for little, the same cannot be said of the production. Director Mike Klar’s scene changes are bulkily handled by the actors in blue light, and it’s clear they’re uncomfortable in the space even with the lights up. This dampens the production a bit, but a play this funny and touching doesn’t come ashore very often.

Presented by Kids With Guns at Center Stage, NY, 48 W. 21st St., NYC. May 5-20. Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m. (212) 868-4444 or www.smarttix.com. Casting by Melissa Braun, Grant Wilfley Casting.