Elaine May’s ‘Adult Entertainment’ Revived By D.C. Theater

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Adult Entertainment, a play set (as the title implies) in the world of adult entertainment and written by the renowned comic playwright, screenwriter and director Elaine May, is enjoying a revival run by a Washington, D.C.-based theatre company, opening this week—and so far the show appears to be receiving better critical response than in its original Off-Broadway run more than 15 years ago. The premise of the play, which appears to be inspired by New York public access TV’s long-running Robin Byrd Show, involves a group of porn performers who decide to make what is called in the play “a real movie,” an art film based on the Greek myth of Icarus.  May, who was 70 when Adult Entertainment had its New York debut in December of 2002, first gained fame in the 1950s as half of the sketch comedy duo Nichols and May, in which she teamed with Mike Nichols—who went on to a lengthy, successful career as a Hollywood director of such films as The Graduate and Working Girl. But though May also enjoyed—and at age 85 continues to enjoy—a highly successful career of her own as a director, writer and actress, she is unfortunately best-known for directing the 1987 big-budget epic Ishtar, which despite featuring two of the biggest movie stars of that era, Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, has gone down as one of the worst flops in Hollywood history. In its original, Off Broadway incarnation, Adult Entertainment was not exactly an Ishtar-level bomb, but it was received in lukewarm fashion at best. While New York Times critic Ben Brantley praised the show’s “hoots and giggles,” he also said that it “deflates before it’s over.” Variety called the play a “shambles” that contained only “mild laughs,” while the wire service UPI was even less kind, slamming the play as “mostly unfunny, tasteless, and trite.” But the current production by the offbeat D.C. theatre troupe The Klunch appears to have turned the critics around. Broadway World found “many, many laughs” in the “highly enjoyable romp,” while D.C. Theatre Scene rated the show “four stars,” though critic Tim Treanor did chide May for “condescending” to her fictional porn characters “to a certain extent.” Even the Washington Post seemed to get a kick out of the “distracting little porno comedy,” which, the paper said, provided an “escape” from the barrage of headlines involving among other things, real-life porn star Stormy Daniels. The revival of Adult Entertainment marks the second time this year a Broadway or Off-Broadway play about the porn industry has been revived by a regional theater. In January, a theater in Columbus, Ohio, staged a new run of The Performers, which had opened and closed on Broadway in 2012. Adult Entertainment runs through March 31. Click on this link for tickets and further information.