Theater: Mee No Like

You had to sympathize with the technical crew, which doggedly called cues from a corner of the huge rectangular space where 3-Legged Dog’s premiere of Charles Mee’s Fire Island—another grueling and fractured narrative by the playwright—is currently on display. From beach chairs and cushions for audience members to sit in, to tubs of cold beer ready for fishing from icy waters, to two colossal screens showing high-definition films of scenes that are also performed live, the anything-can-happen atmosphere was left entirely in the crew’s capable hands.

Along the shorter walls of the space, meanwhile, stood another pair of giant screens; 3-Legged Dog’s website explains that these utilize a technology called the Eyeliner that displays images not only in high-definition but also in three-dimensions, amplifying the otherworldliness of the overall environment.

Let me note at this point that Fire Island, for all of its flimsiness and faults, has the virtue of being the kind of play in which you never feel like you’ll miss something crucial if you have to answer nature’s call. Mee’s patchwork of vignettes—largely a meditation on the vagaries of heterosexual love on a spit of land world-famous for its historic relationship to the gay community—is as blissfully unstructured as a Sunday in July.

So when one audience member, ostensibly wanting to relieve his bladder (and his boredom, I suspect), got up to visit the men’s room, no one thought twice. Taking a route that discreetly led him behind one of the Eyeliner screens, he collided violently with it, causing a sound blast like crackling metal and causing distortion to whatever absurd onscreen image happened to be seen on it in that moment.

Cut to a shot of the technical crew, immobilized from shock, hands literally plastered to their cheeks like mugging Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone. You could see dollar signs register in their eyes as grant money from who knows where slipped from their grasp.

But hey, at least this incident represented some drama, which is considerably more than one can say for the dramatically barren Fire Island. Ever since his haunting and evocative Another Person is a Foreign Country back in 1991, I’ve enjoyed Mee’s work. But lately, with Signature Theatre Company’s odd and disappointing season of new Mee plays and now this, I’m beginning to think his lauded collage-based writing style has become more pose than probe, more pretense than perceptive.

As staged by 3-Legged Dog artistic director Kevin Cunningham, if there’s any overall thrust to Fire Island, it’s about appealing to your sense of novelty: selling hot dogs, hamburgers and sausage patties before and after the show; having much of the onstage dialogue echo the dialogue on screen; having the actors, such as one wielding a knife, play scenes inches from your lounging, beer-swilling face.

But as someone who’s enjoyed many weekends on Cherry Grove, I found it nothing less than offensive for Mee to devote most of his play to straight people, and boring ones at that (the opening onscreen credits give a big, wet thank-you kiss to the community). The result is that although the energetic 13-actor cast is most game for anything Cunningham or Mee might have them do—pulling each other’s pants down, cooing at a table, lecturing us about religiosity and love—Fire Island feels nothing like the Fire Island I adore.

Even if the piece took place—on stage or screen—in one of the other two-dozen-plus Fire Island areas that aren’t linked to the gay world, you have to question the general raison d’etre: a filmed sequence with a naked woman interrupting a shower with her boyfriend to pee; a live sequence in which a man proposes to a woman before their apparent first date. Compared to all this, the presence of an onstage band—especially Albert Kuvezin, a Tuvan throat singer—was music to my ears. Or maybe that was the crash.

Through May 3. 3LD Art & Technology Center, 80 Greenwich St. (below Rector St.), 212-352-3101; $30.