Highbrow

The title of Douglas Carter Beane's new play, The Little Dog Laughed, is a zesty mint for the after-performance mind. But this muscular, epigrammatic comedy is about much more than a cutesy title rich in foreshadowing would suggest.

Principally, the play concerns closeted Hollywood actor Mitchell (Neal Huff), "one of those borderline pretty boys" for whom superstardom is in-creasingly a matter of soon or never. His haughty bitch of an agent, Diane (Julie White), is aiming to buy him a property-the film version of a hit Off-Broad-way gay play-that will catapult him into the Hollywood stratosphere. So the play, on one level, is about the Mephistophelean dotted-line that gay actors sign in exchange for fame: Play it hetero, play the hero.

Mitchell, however, is having what you might call a Tab Hunter moment-an epiphany in which the bargain suddenly seems more bargain-basement. He's through calling callboys for drunken twilight trysts, and anyway, there's something imperceptibly alluring about one particular hustler he calls named Alex (Johnny Galecki). Alex is all cliché: quick to pick a trick's pocket, as unctuously opportunistic as his penis. But Mitchell doesn't want to play Faust anymore.

Nor does Alex want to wont as an escort anymore, nor does Ellen (Zoe Lister-Jones), his girlfriend, want to keep sharing him-although she has a mack daddy of her own. Most important, Diane-a raw, raging lesbian lioness-doesn't want Mitchell messing up this moment, the apex of a years-long effort to make him the next Harrison Ford (or, if you prefer, Tom Cruise). Now Mitch really must make his pact with the devil, and he can't. He defies Diane, moving from his first, sexless hookup with Alex to their second and sex-filled third; he appears in public with him, where they become grist for gawking gossip-hounds. By hitching the sails of every character to every other, The Little Dog Laughed is a symphony of cynicism, cowardice and caprice gussied up as self-satisfied civility. Hooray for Hollywood.

It is also about how quick some of us can be to accept the otherwise-unacceptable when what we so desperately want seems tantalizingly within our grasp-Mitchell's celebrity and Alex's sexuality; Ellen's sullen quest for mutual love; Diane's revenge-driven quest to be a producer. Beane's dialogue is an equal opportunity facilitator, with euphemisms traveling at supersonic speeds and a way with urban slang that grows smarter as things gather steam.

Mostly, though, Beane's humor is what spoils you. Diane calls Mitchell a Mary, a "Miss Nancy." She calls Alex his "twinkiefuck." There's a speech in which Diane recalls Mitchell winning an award: "I'm a lesbian, he's a fag, we're in show business, we're a perfect couple." White's delivery-her whole marvelous, eclectic, dazzling, spunky performance-superbly packages the breathless, vaguely irksome hum of Hollywood ambitiousness. She delivers the play's best monologue, in which sand mandalas made by Buddhist monks and Hollywood deals are both likened to Cobb salads.

If Beane had written the role of Ellen 20 years ago, here's what she'd wear: Doc Martens and black, her alabaster skin against gelled, spiked hair. As it is, the fetching Lister-Jones knows all the cadences of the seen-it-all club girl. When Alex says clubbing is boring, she deadpans, "I only wish to God I had known that at the time I began all this because I would have done a little more drugs and paid a little less attention."

Huff, too, is funny. In a scene in which Mitchell helps pitch the unseen gay-play scribe to sell his film rights, his eyebrows offer peaks and troughs as he says, "When I was in college I did a scene from 'obscure theater reference here' from 'collection of earlier plays now long out of print.'" Now, that's delicious-and dangerous, for Huff, rich acting aside, is ultimately miscast: He isn't physically believable as a star on the rise. Galecki, whose sleek physique makes for cheeky nude scenes, is dead on but for bits of Beane's writing. Alex reveals that Ellen calls his escort name his "nom de shtup"-rimshot. Another time, he rhymes "gay" with a half-dozen other words, ending in, "Oy vey." Galecki makes it work, but you wonder: Did the little dog have schnapps? n