Hard Up for Laughs

Should the limits of your humor not stretch past sex jokes, Viagara Falls is the play for you. Should you require a little bit more by way of comedy than septuagenarians cracking jokes about Viagra (“Maybe they’ll make a liquid form,” one character says to another, “and then you can pour yourself a stiff one”) and generally acting like aged refugees from the American Pie films, then you will spend 90 minutes in an agony of stone-faced boredom.

For his 77th birthday, Charley (Lou Cutell) decides to hire a prostitute to bring a little spark into the lives of himself and his best friend Moe (Bernie Kopell). We are treated to a great deal of argument back and forth between the two irascible (but lovable!) old geezers about the wisdom of this arrangement before Jacqueline Tempest (Teresa Ganzel) finally arrives in a tiny skirt, high heels and low-cut blouse. They want to get to know her and play parlor games; she just wants to do her job.

There are some attempts at farce with Viagra pills in an aspirin bottle (when have you ever seen a blue aspirin?) and Jacqueline teaching Moe and Charley how to do a stripper bump, but there’s nothing funny about this low-rent sex farce playing Off-Broadway. It’s been given a shockingly lavish production (Sydney Z. Litwack’s set is consistently more interesting than anything that happens on it), but all the gift-wrapping and ribbons in the world can’t convince us that this play is anything other than a nostalgia trip outfitted with senior erections and Sinatra tunes. It’s as if the characters from ’60s sex farces like Under the Yum Yum Tree have wandered on stage, older but no less horny.

Kopell and Cutell are both TV legends (if Kopell’s role on The Love Boat can constitute legendary status), so there’s a certain amount of comfort for older television fans in seeing them live in person. But both roles are so poorly written (and Cutell mugs so shamelessly) that any pleasure one could take in seeing two old comedy pros at work is squandered after half an hour. Ganzel is perfectly fine as the aging hooker with a heart of gold, though she does have a habit of dropping her arms at the ends of sentences so abruptly that her hands slap against her thighs, a sure sign that an actor is uncomfortable on stage.

Written by Cutell and Joao Machado (yes, it took two people to write a play filled with jokes about failing bodies and anal conditions), the show has a distinct community theater stench to it. One can imagine this playing well in a small-town theater, cast with actors familiar to audiences from the neighborhood. But playing just down the street from the theater that saw Playwrights Horizons premiering Circle Mirror Transformation, This and Clybourne Park last season, cheap sex jokes just aren’t enough. For the show’s duration, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching the stage adaptation of a particularly risqué Hallmark TV movie. And that is not a compliment.

Viagara Falls

Open run, Little Shubert Theatre, 422 W. 42nd St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-239-6200; $69.