Sitcomish Squalor and Dysfunction
Charles IsherwoodMay 21, 2010: The new play “Oliver Parker!” at the Cherry Lane Theater might qualify as offensive — certainly it strives mightily for that dubious laurel — if it were not so patently artificial. Set in a noisome New York apartment, where an adolescent boy and his alcoholic older companion enact a sitcomic relationship that gradually reveals darker shadings, Elizabeth Meriwether’s comedy combines the crass vulgarity that passes for wit in teen-aimed Hollywood movies with a well-worn stage cliché, the scabrously dark story of family dysfunction.
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