POWER LUNCH
The menu at Cafe Voltaire features items like vegetarian sloppy joes, sesame noodles, and peach-apricot-strawberry milk shakes. But the main course in Alan Ball’s clever comedy Power Lunch, presented as an experience in “environmental urban dinner theater,” is fantasy. Make that fantasies–the immature, improbable, sometimes interchangeable secret notions of a man and woman trying to balance their urges to compete, copulate, and connect.
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He’s a pushy, Porsche-driving young exec who carries a portable phone and the latest Playboy in his black leather attache case. She’s a tough-edged corporate climber who wears a silk scarf as a substitute necktie–“a superficial and totally absurd symbol that one must display to be taken seriously in the male-dominated business world,” she fumes. Meeting by chance in a fern-bar eatery, they fight, flirt, and testily test the waters of a possible new relationship. She wants “a man who is smart, funny, confident, sensitive, affectionate, gentle, strong, independent, committed, caring, stable, and willing to take risks”; she also dreams of Mel Gibson dressed in nothing but Saran Wrap. He’d like “a tall, large-breasted temptress who wears her sex like cheap perfume.” Neither fills the other’s bill, but when strains of samba music suddenly burst from nowhere, they can’t resist dancing.
The world of Power Lunch makes the world of The Fantasticks seem astonishingly quaint. In Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s 1960 musical, which also takes as its topic the ridiculous fantasies of a young couple, the romance of Matt and Luisa is fueled by the wall that literally and symbolically divides them; after intimacy leaves them bored with each other, Matt heads off to seek adventure while Luisa submissively stays home and waits until her weary, beaten, but more mature boyfriend returns to reclaim her. Yet despite the story’s datedness, a collection of exquisite light-jazz songs and a wryly poetic script (inspired by Edmond Rostand’s Les romanesques) can make The Fantasticks (still running off-Broadway 32 years after its premiere, making it the longest-running show in history) work like a charm.
