The Little Dog Laughed

The Little Dog Laughed
Cort Theater

The Little Dog Laughed has a rather enigmatic title, whose meaning is only revealed in the final moments of the play. I will, in brief, spoil it for you. It should hopefully in no way spoil your experience of the play. The title comes from the nursery rhyme, “The Little Dog Laughed to see such sport, and the Dish ran away with the Spoon.”

The use of the nursery rhyme points to the early education of children that dishes run away with spoons, not other dishes. The implication is that heterosexual is set as the norm from the earliest moments of language. In the play, the excruciating choice is to sacrifice personal satisfaction to the cultural norm.

Now, that seems pretty serious, doesn’t it? It would be only fair to point out that the play actually utilizes fully another childhood saying, “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” This play is medicine disguised as sugar.

The Little Dog Laughed is a social statement coated in sugar. It is bitingly funny. It is a comedy. Julie White is comedic in the part of Diane. I laughed so hard that I didn’t notice until later how serious it had been.

In a nutshell, Diane is a Hollywood agent who has a long-term managing relationship with a rising star who is a closeted, not entirely self-aware, gay man. He calls up a, uhm… service provider, and is sent a young man. The young man and the movie star fall in love, of course, after a few more, uhm, dates (think Pretty Woman here for a minute). Only, there is a catch. The young male prostitute has been telling himself he is straight and has been regularly sleeping with a woman for some time. He has, come to find out, gotten her pregnant. Additional problems arise when a movie deal starts to fall through as the movie star starts to experiment with being gay in the press. All of a sudden everyone , the movie star, the callboy and the “girlfriend” have significant problems and the Hollywood agent (we could call her the ‘little dog’ except she creates and participates in the sport as much as watches it) is called in to solve the problems in a satisfactory matter for everyone. Needless to say, there is varied degree of loss and gain for all involved parties. Did I mention this is funny?

This is not an overly complicated story, but the tension that slowly builds is quite satisfactory even if the plausible resolution to the problems seems unnecessarily cruel or un-modern. Again, Julie White was amazing. And, I found Ari Graynor strong in the role of the girlfriend. The two male leads were strong enough, but it was not hard to walk away and think they could have probably been stronger. I would have liked to have taken a couple of pieces of furniture off of the set for home, so the sets were good enough. They transitioned well, but they weren’t Broadway blockbuster.

I have recommended this to nearly everyone I know.
I have especially recommended it to my gay/lesbian friends as they rarely get a romance they can fully relate to and, actually, I hope they can’t fully relate to this one. All the same, this is best for people who like more comedic social works (does that type exist?)—and if this is the one thing you are going to see while you are in town from Omaha I hope you just love politics and would prefer this sort of thing over a song and dance musical.