LITTLE COMFORTS and
Not that Dillman the playwright made things easy for Dillman the director. Little Comforts feels less like a finished work than a confused and contrived crazy quilt of styles, cliches, and half-explored ideas cadged from, among others, Luigi Pirandello, Edward Albee, and Eugene Ionesco. At the center of this digressive mess sits a cartoonish, intensely unlikable couple, Fran and Gus, who not unlike Mommy and Daddy in Albee’s The American Dream and George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? find themselves trapped in a loveless, dysfunctional marriage.
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Irace and Goudreau are absolutely charming as the picnicking couple, and in their capable hands Dillman’s lines sparkle. In fact, these two fly through the play’s comic patter with the ease of a seasoned comedy team, revealing various foibles or rattling off childhood reminiscences: “G.I. Joe wasn’t a doll!” “How come he had all those natty little outfits?” “Those were action outfits!” I could have listened to those two for hours.
