Shoulda Stayed in Vegas

Coming across as an “Anything goes!” version of a variety show, Joe Marshall’s A Night in Vegas delivers exactly what seems promised by the rainbow-hued poster, which prominently features both a muscular man draped in a towel and a warning of nudity: a series of fitfully amusing gay vignettes, all set in the same hotel room in Vegas over the course of a few weeks.

Cast with mostly fresh-off-the-bus actors (and one actress), A Night in Vegas doesn’t really have much to say about being gay in America in 2010, though Marshall (who also directed) sometimes makes the mistake of thinking that it does. Alternating between fluffy and serious, the show limps along, only fitfully taking flight until painfully banal lessons are learned in the final seriocomic story. Among other plots, two strangers reveal their secret anxieties to one another over beers, a middle-aged liberal/conservative couple come to town for their son’s marriage to another man and two hotel employees, a hooker and a corpse complicate a couple’s vacation. All of the vignettes, however, share one important thing: They function as little more than excuses for the young, tight-bodied actors to take it all off.

Surprisingly for a show that features multiple penises, there’s very little titillation. The hammy acting and leaden line readings have often been better in actual gay porn films, and the clunky, self-conscious dialogue (“I feel alone even in a crowded bar,” one character says) is reliably funnier than the actual jokes. “It looks like RuPaul threw up in here,” someone cracks in the opening scene, and though Casper De la Torre’s set is intentionally tacky, it’s also shockingly cheap. Doors should not wobble in a farce; it’s like rule number one. The actors are more wooden than those doors.

Along the way, there are some performers who manage to wring laughs from Marshall’s campy lines. Foremost among them are Denis Hawkins, who scores as a bitchy blind man in an otherwise tedious story about a deaf gay man who secretly smokes, and Nicholas Pierro, who is genuinely funny as a queeny character in the final story, dropping barbed comments with aplomb. They’re also two of the few actors in the piece who get to remain fully clothed.

The rest of the cast range from solid to absurd, but the evening’s winner for most puzzling casting decision is the play’s sole female, Ali Grieb. Cast as the middle-aged mother of a son who is about to marry his older lover in Vegas, Grieb wears a Shirley Jones wig but nothing else implies that her character is old enough to have been married for 30 years. Distractingly miscast as she may be (especially opposite the older Bill Purdy as her husband), what does Grieb’s performance matter, really? If you’re going to see A Night in Vegas, you’ll be going for gay actors (or actors playing gay) to take it all off. Only those who want a little wit and heart with their nudity will be disappointed.

A Night in Vegas

Open run, Bleecker Street Theatre, 45 Bleecker St. (betw. Lafayette St. & Bowery), 212-239-6200; $35.