A text I sent during the intermission of Bunny Bunny: Gilda Radner, a (sort of) Love Story: “Act I of the Gilda Radner thing. A hot mess minus the hot. A bad play. A pretty sizable house. No one is here. Attendance is less than 10% of the house. Maybe less than 5%. Crickets baby, crickets. Oh… I missed seeing the balcony. Less than 2% for sure. And, oddly, nearly all of us are seated in the third row. I’m moving for more fidgeting capacity.”
First let’s fix the unwieldy title. A Bunny Bunny Lady perhaps? Everyone who was around for the launch of Saturday Night Live knows how funny Ms. Radner was. The titular bunny x2 reference is from a poignant memory of her father. Emmy Award winning Alan Zweibel wrote this play. The plot revolves around their relationship from meeting and working together at SNL through their separate marriages until her untimely death from ovarian cancer. Very little of Gilda’s actual work is contained in this piece which is one of several problems. Act II does start off with the song “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals” from her 1979 Broadway outing, Gilda Radner – Live From New York.
Dana Tretta plays Gilda and does a fine job conveying her spirit without mimicry or caricature. I also enjoyed the antics of Jason Grimm who played “Everyone Else” such as waiters, cameraman, a taxi driver, Andy Warhol, etc. He provided needed comic relief and distraction from the main storyline. Since this seems to be a very personal memory play, perhaps all of this material is emotionally and factually very real. If a fan who attended her show in 1979 cannot be pulled into the material, then we know why it’s mostly crickets.
A tall fake plant has a sizable supporting role here. It is significant as the location where Gilda and Alan first meet. A stagehand moves the plant from place to place around the stage between the frequent scene changes. The plant gets a curtain call. Channeling my best Emily Latella here: “never mind.”