The SpeakEasy Stage Company’s presentation of Justin Huertas’ musical“Lizard Boy” at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through November 22, is both goofy and profound, unpretentious and portentous.
Directed by Lyndsay Allyn Cox with musical guidance by Violet Wang, the production starts out with a sole actor, Keiji Ishiguri, playing Trevor, a young resident of Seattle who is suffering from an asocial personality disorder grounded in his having grown crocodile skin from having been splattered with dragon’s blood during a field trip in elementary school.
Have you got that?
If you accept the comic plausibility of this background, then you will doubtless accept the fact that the only time our hero ventures out in society is during the once-a-year Dragon Festival when everyone is costumed as someone or something weird.
Have you got that, or have you already walked out?
I stayed mainly because the principal actors, a mere threesome, all accepted this absolutely loony premise and its consequences with multi-talented glee. Along with Ishiguri, Peter DiMaggio, as Cary, and Chelsie Nectow, as Siren, cavorted on stage with the hectic precision of the British Monty Python troupe. And like Vaudevillians of another earlier era in America, they not only acted but played multiple musical instruments from the august cello to a prankish kazoo and used voices tuned in song to underline emotions that could, but for this lyric emphasis, fly by not fully examined.
Congratulations to both their intimacy and fight coordinators, they kissed full-on; fought ferociously enough to draw blood — albeit mostly dragon blood. They spun and turned from prankish adolescents to make raw confessions that we adults in the audience would lean in to listen to closer in the sudden silence.
How did it all cohere? As I walked out still wondering the answer to that, I wished that I’d had a look at the pre-show rehearsals to see how these three ‘musqueteers’ were able to magic this improbable plot into a drama of heart and soul solid enough to give us food for thought, turning over nuggets of wisdom delivered with comic solemnity, heartfelt off-handedness.
And then there was that kazoo piercing above the klaxon blare of traffic to recall new delights of theater present on the Speak Easy Stage of a casual afternoon.
(The SpeakEasy Staqe Company’s presentation of Justin Huertas’ “Lizard Boy” continues through November 22 at the Roberts Studio Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston’s South End with performances on Wednesday and Thursday at 7 p.m., Friday at 7:30 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7:30 p.m. and on Sunday at 3 p.m. There will also be a weekday matinee on Thursday November 20 at2 p.m. For more information, visit speakeasystage.com.)