The Peoples Improv Theater’s presented David and Katie Get Re-Married, a play billed as a “darkly comedic real-time wedding” and it fulfills that promise. The musical loosely uses the wedding format to explore the twisted relationship of the titular characters David and Katie, played by David Carl (Gary Busey’s One-Man Hamlet) and Katie Hartman (Skinny Bitch Jesus Meeting). In the beginning, they confidently promise to teach everyone in the audience about love– Katie sometimes nags the audience to write things down.
While the characters are anything but wise, the play does an excellent job of exploring relationships in all their messiness. In the song “Threesome,” they describe all the things David and Katie did while trying to get the spark back in their sex life, including threesomes, foursomes, meeting up with furries from Craigslist, and attending a Satanist orgy. The song starts off as just a crude, funny, catchy jam, but what David and Katie Get Re-Married does best is hit you with surprise bursts of emotional resonance in the midst of all the silliness. At the end of the song, they talk about drifting apart and becoming exhausted by their own sex lives. The final lyrics, while still funny, really hit me: “Let’s try a no-some/ No sex at all/ No masturbation/ Winter, spring, summer, or fall/ Frozen, inert/ At least it no longer hurt.”
Another musical number gives us the song that Katie wrote immediately after their divorce. This song epitomizes the combination of angst and silly comedy in this play, as she sings, “I am the sun/ And you are the sun/ And that’s far too many suns.”
In their writing, David Carl and Katie Hartman make writing realistic, silly, dark relationships seem easy. I can’t wait to see what else they write in the future. They’re also strong performers. It’s particularly easy to imagine Katie Hartman becoming a sitcom star in the near future. Credit for the show also goes to director Michole Biancosino, a co-founding director of the Project Y Theatre Company.
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