Edge Festival premieres 'Unitard 3'

The actress questions the audience: "Are you gay? Are you gay?" Immediately, the latest show in the Theater Offensive's Out on the Edge Festival puts its audience on the defensive.

By this point, however, the Offensive has already commenced its attack on the straights in the crowd (i.e. non-lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered). A pre-show introduction to the Festival from Artistic Director Abe Rybeck _ and his five-inch, dangling earrings _ sets the tone for a night of flamboyant and energetic sketch comedy with gay themes.

At the beginning of the performance, the three performers/writers of Unitard 3: Now More Than Ever (Mike Albo, Nora Burns and David Ilku) sit on three separate chairs spitting off one-liners _ some funny, some not and some hysterical, if you understand the references. The majority of these one-liners are spoken with in a stereotypical "gay" voice, which one might say simply, is a bit much. Yet, at the same time we've heard this concept many times before, and the jokes wane in their originality and subsequent amusement value.

This is not to say that the rest of the show plays off this one joke. Actually, the sketches generally go beyond the superficial gay typecast to create actual characters who happen to be gay, which then makes the gay-related material funnier. Also, while homosexuality is the theme of the Festival, not all the scenes deal with gay issues or even gay people.

The show's set is simple, rudimentary and flexible and for good reason. With sketch comedy, the goal is to only haphazardly create a scene with props and then to fill it out with dialogue and characters. To a certain extent, the writing and the acting accomplishes the goal, which is no small feat considering most of the scenes have only one actor on stage at a time talking to an imagined other person.

Problems arise when either the idea for the scene or the character grows tiresome and the audience hopes for the scene to end. This setback may have been avoided with additional or stronger-written characters and shorter scenes. The audience cannot be expected to continue to pay attention to an essentially one-person scene once they have lost interest in that one character, especially in sketch comedy. This difference separates solo from multiple-person scenes in that that the latter category can survive with an annoying character or two while the former simply cannot.

Since the majority of the scenes are basically monologues, the show is best evaluated on a scene-by-scene, actor-by-actor basis. To start with, Nora Burns played a variety of characters in her several scenes. Her first scene involves her as a straight woman trying to convince a gay man to let her be his "Fag Hag" _ the gay man's female companion who "goes out with him between boyfriends." With a funny, interesting character and concept, this scene demonstrates how good a one-person scene can be when the audience is implicated as the other character.

Later on, after a couple mediocre scenes, she comes back with two great characters and concepts. The first being a woman pushing her newborn child in a stroller and running into a woman she used to work with before she had the child. She uses the baby very effectively by cutting off the imaginary other person with responses to the baby's coughing or simply by repeating things to the baby to emphasize how awful the other woman's life is that she is not married, still working and nearing 40.

Her next scene shows her at an "Artists Anonymous" meeting where she confesses giving up a life of financial security to explore her creativity as an artist. She makes her way to this meeting only after, to paraphrase what she says, finding herself one day running through the streets of New York naked, shouting out Haiku poetry and scrambling for objects to make art from. The strength of this scene and the baby scene lie not only in the obvious humor of the characters and the concepts, but also in their inclusion of higher-level satire that makes one think as well as laugh.

Some of the other scenes accomplish this feat, as well. Mike Albo does a scene where he is a gay man talking with his ex-boyfriend at a party and continually puts him down with socially inappropriate comments reminiscent of many encounters between ex's, whether gay or straight. In addition, David Ilku does a scene where he is a worker at Calvin Klein and he is showing the new guy around. This scene rightly puts the fashion industry in its place by basically saying, "at Calvin Klein, we don't believe in bodily functions."

The remainder of the scenes, especially the ensemble pieces, range from kind of funny to forgettable. Certainly, the performance is filled with great one-liners and funny characters, although some become recycled. Overall, Unitard 3: Now More Than Ever is well worth checking out, once, no matter where your sexual preferences may lie.

Unitard 3: Now More Than Ever is playing at the Boston Center for the Arts (617-426-2787) this Friday and Saturday nights at 9:30 p.m., Wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. and next Friday and Saturday nights at 9:30 p.m.