Mysterious lays Lust and love at enigmatic work BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	JUST SAY LOVE Written and directed by David Mauriello | with Jason Bolduc and Jonathan Barron | Produced at the Players’ Ring, in Portsmouth | through September 18 | 603.778.7607

A romantic comedy that tells of a relationship between two men often comes across as a "gay romantic comedy" — a play with very particular themes, so specific as to diminish, somewhat, the scope of its romance. Not so with Just Say Love, an original play written and directed by David Mauriello at the Players’ Ring. This is not a play about homosexual love, or homosexual sex.

For one thing, studly construction-worker Doug believes himself as straight as they come when he first sits down next to Guy, a sensitive, gay vegetarian who paints. But nor is Just Say Love, at heart, a tale of homosexual awakening. Mauriello’s story of Guy and Doug encompasses all these things, but it is ultimately much more ambitious. His is a play about the enigma of attraction itself, and he treats it as the intricate and ancient question that it is.

Indeed, when we first meet Guy (Jason Bolduc), he’s sitting on a Boston park bench reading Plato to himself aloud. " ‘When we see a God-like form, we are amazed,’ " Guy muses, " ‘because it reminds us of our own God-like nature.’ " Right on cue enters Doug (Jonathan Barron), looking rather God-like himself in a sleeveless T-shirt, carrying a mud-bucket full of rugged equipment and a rather obviously huge meat sub. As Doug struggles with the intricacies of the sandwich’s wrapper and then finally busts it open with a slash of his long saw, the fastidious Guy is, well, amazed — at once repelled and drawn.

The two men home in on each other immediately, viscerally, and soon are discussing both Doug’s problem with addiction — that is, insatiable horniness — and Plato’s theory of love: Once, each of us was one perfect being, but was then broken into two. The ideal of Platonic love, Guy tells Doug, aspires to finding someone close to that other half, thereby reapproaching, as best we can, divinity.

At first glance, this ideal seems pretty blatantly at odds with the base desires of both men to slip back to Guy’s apartment for a quick, purely carnal blow. Then again, love works in mysterious ways, and the sublime and the profane are, of course, anything but mutually exclusive.

Likewise, the language of playwright Mauriello’s work contains both lofty Platonic rhetoric and banalities about excretion; Eastern mysticism and no small amount of cock humor. Well-balanced and witty, the script is fast-paced in a way that demands a lot of its actors: It takes the two men from their fraught introduction to a candid sexual proposition in about 10 minutes, and in that brief time the audience has to become convinced of a rather exceptional attraction between these unlikely lovers.

It’s to the immense credit of Barron and Bolduc that we do become convinced, and quickly. These are two fine and experienced actors, equally adept with language and silence, gesture and gaze. On Mauriello’s simple set of a table, chairs, and bench — and often miming their props — these actors inhabit fully formed and eminently watchable characters. And although in culture and manners these characters are two very different men — compared to Guy’s hand-wringing, expressive gaze, and often airborne pitch, Doug has an animalism a lot like Stanley Kowalski’s — Bolduc and Barron make their magnetism as classically elegant as it is crude.

What Guy and Doug have in common are a striking candor, curiosity, and receptivity, and in league, these qualities are electric. Part of the electricity is in the tension between their differences and their draw. When Doug visits Guy’s apartment to hang ornaments on his Christmas tree — just a tidy little house plant — Doug comments, "Nice. Nice tree." In his tone and expression are both wryness and affection, mockery and appreciation, and it’s a fine metonym of the relationship itself. Most important and impressive, Bolduc and Barron succeed in conveying that most ineffable of phenomena, the gut attraction that defies all rationality.

As the gut turns out to be, after all, the doorway to the heart, and the two men start actually saying "love," Mauriello’s script loses some of its poignancy to more sentimental language.

Things get a bit too pat toward the end, and a more provocative script might have been a little less generous with payoff and resolution. The marvelously acted magnetism between Guy and Doug is alone enough to compel and mystify; cosmic coincidences concerning a cat, Doug’s girlfriend, and one of Guy’s paintings seem superfluous.

But at its best, Mauriello’s production is not just intelligent and unexpected, but even bewitching. In our best and deepest loves, often, there is also a strangeness, something that’s eerie in its stealth and inexplicable familiarity. These are spooky things, and this production both asks us to consider their meaning, and lets us feel the shivers. To watch a disbelieving, astounded Guy slowly raise his hands to Doug’s bare chest — and later, to see Doug return the gesture — is almost to have witnessed a mystical act.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com