Review: What the Deuce!

Critic’s Pick

A certain tone is set when a production asks of its audience before it's even begun to contribute to the performance. Such is the case with What the Deuce! — a top hat on stage asks for one-liner breakup excuses  — and that resulting tone is anticipation.

Relax. After all, you know going into it (or you do now) that this is a show about relationships, which naturally involves love, sex and laughs. And the interactive element exemplifies the audience’s relationship with the cast.

The performers, Dylan Shelton and Annie Kalahurka, sketch comedians who call themselves Devil’s Deuce, wrote the script, and it shows in their energetic delivery. Over the course of an hour the two try to determine what kind of couple they are — New Age, redneck and mail-order are a few possibilities — with puppets, song and rhyme (yes, there’s a skit called “Female White Rapper”) through six onstage sketches and five how-we-met video segments à la When Harry Met Sally.

What the Deuce! does focus on the nastiness of love: finding out she is a he; when farting is no longer taboo between partners; when your first love, Righty, is no longer able to get physical (arthritis). Yet there is some sweetness, especially in the story of Shelton and Kalahurka as half-baked British skin artists; they were joined by a tattoo.

Certain jokes are a tad too juvenile, and even Shelton, as Prince Charming, asks near the end, “Have I taken this metaphor too far?” — to which he got an honest “Yes.” Some highlights were the New Age couple who talk of their meeting sometime after the peyote wore off in New Mexico and the improv skit “Fill in the Break Up.” Shelton and Kalahurka made (audience provided) explanations like “you’re too ugly” work well for their audience-suggested setting: the Drop-Inn Center, in our case.

Audience participation doesn’t stop at “Fill in the Break Up,” but divulging any more information would take the fun out of it. And that would completely negate the point of this production.

— Jessica Canterbury