When out actor/director Alan Kilpatrick read Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed” last year, it wasn’t just the laughs and razor-sharp dialogue that impressed him. It was the play’s timeliness.
A satire about life in and out of the closet in Hollywood, “The Little Dog Laughed” debuts in Atlanta next week at Theatre in the Square, with Kilpatrick at the helm.
The play’s tale of a gay actor trying to hide his sexual orientation is especially topical today. Mitch (Chad Martin) is an actor on the rise who meets male hustler Alex (Ben Reed) via an escort service. Alex has a girlfriend but is wrestling with his sexuality.
After that first meeting, they see each other again.
“But Mitch is afraid of coming out, afraid of what it will do to his career,” Kilpatrick says. "The common woman won’t lust after him, and the common man will feel superior to him."
Lala Cochran plays Diane, Mitch’s super ambitious agent who will stop at nothing to make her client a household name. She is a lesbian who is trying to keep Mitch in the closet, balking at the suggestion that he go to an awards show with his mother, instead suggesting the two go together and share a kiss.
Mitchell takes a stand and demands to be photographed with a man.
"I think actors seem to be edging towards that, toward that belief that their personal life is not their professional life," Kilpatrick says. "Things seem to be changing.”
Kilpatrick calls himself a big fan of playwright Beane, who also wrote the acclaimed "As Bees in Honey Drown."
“[Beane] writes such hip dialogue,” Kilpatrick says. “It’s very much like if Noel Coward or Moliere or Oscar Wilde were writing today. He writes about delicious people we love to hate and hate to love.”
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