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Apr. 12--"Based on a Totally True Story," which opened last night at Manhattan Theatre Club's second stage, feels like a young man's play. Why shouldn't it? Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a Marvel Comics writer just three years out of the Yale School of Drama, has written this promising little personal-growth comedy about a young comic-book writer on the verge of his first big break and his first big breakup.
There is a just-hatched quality to this good-natured, if familiar and self-congratulatory, exploration of young talent in the fabulous turmoil of gay-hip Manhattan and the equally fabulous depravity of commercial Hollywood. The adventure begins, as do so many plays these days, with the main character/authorial voice telling the audience, "This is a story of ..."
Ethan appears to be going around having life experiences for the first time. There's no old-soul resonance in this boy-man, endearingly played by Caron Elrod as if Sean Penn were a "Peanuts" character. He meets his first live-in love, cute, at Java Boy in Chelsea and, oh dear, must learn how to share his time and his personal pain.
Then, for the first time, he realizes the fallibility of the happy-parents illusion and begins to appreciate that, hey, his dad has needs, too. Ethan, who writes "The Flash" as his day job, lives in a Cinderella world where every first novel gets published, every young man's play is optioned for the movies and, if Spielberg passes on it, there is always HBO.
Aguirre-Sacasa, who writes the monthly adventures of "The Sensational Spider-Man" and "The Fantastic Four" as his day job, has a bam-pow rhythm and a jaunty way with the overlapping forces of emotional contradiction. Director Michael Bush stresses the humanity in characters who are more self-centered and obnoxious than the playwright seems to realize.
Michael Tucker, fondly remembered as Stuart Markowitz in "L.A. Law," finds the unpredictable streak in Ethan's father, whose journey is possibly a more interesting one than his son's. Pedro Pascal manages to make us care about Ethan's boyfriend, a culture writer for the Village Voice who warns the career-obsessed Ethan: "I don't want to be the second most important thing in anybody's life!"
It may be impossible for Kristine Nielsen to play a boring character, but she repeats a bit too many of her soft tough-cookie trademarks as Ethan's Hollywood producer, a woman who barks: "There's no such thing as too schematic. There is too challenging and too original." With an adorable lack of vanity, newcomer Erik Heger switches from the butch comics editor to the nerdy video clerk to the hunky, ambitious, nearly naked Hollywood actor at the pool.
We are baffled by the significance of the Chinese-checkerboard carpet and the random changing lights in the squares of Anna Louizos' minimal set. But MTC, which developed the play in the same 6@7 series that turned out "Proof" and "Fuddy Meers," supports the new work with customary pride and care.
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