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Taking a chance on me and you in 'How to Cheat'

REVIEW: A stylish play dares adults to sneak away from their lives and dip their toe into something new.

December 2, 2011 at 4:35PM
Candy Simmons and Randy Reyes in "How to Cheat."
Candy Simmons and Randy Reyes in "How to Cheat." (Star Tribune/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Be careful the next time you make eyes with someone over the shrimp cocktail. The object of your harmless party flirting might take you seriously -- might get inside your skin and change your world.

In "How to Cheat," playwright Alan Berks guides two unmoored souls across a psychic jungle gym, as they dabble in infatuation and eventually confront the thrill of their own disaster. Berks also directs this slim dagger, a well-acted and visualized play, which opened Thursday at Gremlin Theatre.

Louisito (Randy Reyes) and Meredith (Candy Simmons) have drifted far away from the posturing apes at a rich person's party. He is a stem-cell researcher, single, confident and articulate. She is a married journalist, similarly assured. They sniff each other out, circling and jousting, as they tiptoe through a series of platforms arranged into a spiral staircase by set designer John Bueche.

Berks puts sardonic banter into their mouths -- words and ideas with which they can impress each other. Coquetry is, after all, a performance art. Louisito is clearly the agent of change. At one point he barks that those who oppose his research live by dogma while he is trying to better the physical and real lives of people. Ah, a worthwhile metaphor for this moment of dalliance: should these two give in to the real heat of their bodies, or allow moral dictates to cool their passion?

Well, you guessed right. Old Lou and Mary tango up the staircase (a nice moment choreographed by Joy Davina) and fall into bed.

Katharine Horowitz's sound and Peter W. Mitchell's lights both play key roles in helping to shift Berks' production from something resembling reality into an adventure of the mind. The earthquake of love changes everything, after all. Reyes and Simmons both spin monologues while the other sleeps things off, and then they join in a stylish tête a tête over a hot card game.

Once the surrealism concludes, Berks runs his characters through a quick course of remorse (or the lack of it). Simmons' Meredith has the greater burden of angst. Louisito argues that he's single and hasn't done anything wrong -- if we could even judge what's right or wrong in this crazy world. A hard-working man needs amusement, you know.

Moral evasions or not, Berks argues for a willingness to risk and break patterns. As Louisito says, the fundamental state of the world is change.

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So beware as the champagne softens your spine at the next holiday party. Someone might just dare to offer you a way out of your quiet desperation.

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