The top prize in the Gorilla Theatre's 2001 Inaugural Dramatist Festival went to Kato McNickle, whose To Die for Want of Lobster follows all the rules of conventional playwriting. A conflict and a cliffhanger end the first act. Characters aren't, at first, what they seem. There's even a gun, which would be a cliche if Americans weren't so gun-crazy. In between these requisite plot points, however, is a dull and pointless exercise in trendy nihilism.
McNickle's play opens on the cusp of a one-night stand. Jack (Bryan Colley) has picked up a blackjack dealer named Lena (Lesley Baker) at a casino. He's fresh out of a marriage and a job and is freeloading off his older sister, Barbara (Susan Glennemeier), who's not thrilled with Jack's intention to tryst on her futon. But in the author's many marriages of playwriting convenience, Barbara changes her mind a few lines later, setting up an eventual chain of blackmail, lawyers and murder. That she is a second-grade teacher is, like other details in the play, irrelevant.
What Barbara is is a doormat. Jack moves Lena in the next day -- again, to Barbara's initial refusal but eventual approval. (This is a woman whose "no" means "OK.") The play becomes a combination of the revenge fantasy Thelma and Louise and the lesbian film noir Bound without their wit, style or savvy. With the help of tequila, a threesome unfolds -- there's the hint of some offstage sexual asphyxiation -- that gives only Barbara a smidgen of guilt. Lena effectively shakes some of Barbara's priggishness out of her -- perhaps too much. The audience members aren't the only ones who will say, "Oh, brother."
Jack tries to smooth over the prickly repercussions in the second act. "It was a mistake," he admits at one point. When Barbara replies, "Some of it," he fears he's in over his head. A catfight, another gun and a vacuum cleaner figure in the elimination of the most expendable character, whose absence doesn't make anyone's heart grow fonder.
The play is directed competently by Tara Varney, who shows a knack for moving actors through this verbal pudding. Colley and Baker have a general idea of who their characters are supposed to be, and Glennemeier has a little more versatility than they do, but McNickle's script does them in. The presentation of kink isn't as automatically compelling as the author thinks, especially when it comes out of nowhere.
McNickle clearly wants Lena to represent one of those dramatic linchpins that enter strangers' lives and wreck them. That's achieved on the surface. But to mount one idea without a surplus of others isn't an accomplishment -- it's a first draft.