Review: Hipsters Double-Check Their Privilege in ‘Cute Activist’

NEW YORK — Jen is a white, 26-year-old architect hoping to “decolonialize” herself by hooking up with a black man. Gil is a black, 22-year-old caregiver whose goal is to become a stay-at-home dad with a well-paid wife.

Despite their apparent compatibility, their first date, at a restaurant featuring $50 salads, doesn’t go well.

Gil seems more interested in Jen’s bread-winning potential than in her painful struggle to regret her advantages. He doesn’t love being part of her decolonialization project. At the same time, Jen is less than impressed with Gil’s frequently touted feminist credentials. “How, specifically, do you support women,” she asks, “besides being vaguely personally effeminate?”

And they’re both rude to the waiter.

This pair, whom privilege has turned into ludicrous moral pretzels, is at the center of “Cute Activist,” a zippy new comedy by Milo Cramer at the Bushwick Starr. Serious-minded yet silly, dense with wordplay and anything-goes theatricality, the play is so heavily swaddled in its down vest of irony, snark and satire that you can hardly locate its heart.

But what a brilliant match of material and theater it is. Supposedly set in “a spoOoOoky town in mythical Connecticut where inequality reigns,” the world of the play feels exactly like, you know, Bushwick, with its tenements and wine bars cheek by jowl. Packed into the Starr’s 71 seats on Friday night, the audience, whose average age seemed to be 25, looked an awful lot like the characters onstage.

Or like Jen and Gil at least. But “Cute Activist,” produced by the Starr along with New Saloon, in association with Clubbed Thumb, represents (and satirizes) nonhipsters too. The waiter and the restaurant’s manager — who, tellingly, are given no names, just occupations — are a middle-aged lesbian couple hanging onto a “speck” of a home amid rampant overdevelopment. They put up with the likes of Jen and Gil because they have no choice: “Restaurants are places people pay to act like babies,” Waiter explains.

At the other extreme is a character called Landlorde — the “e,” he says, is a “baroque flourish” — who sets about his project of gentrification with the erotic eagerness of Dracula. He even wears a cape.

Cramer is not too proud to take some dramatic shortcuts: Landlorde not only owns the restaurant but also employs Jen to design the skyscrapers that will replace affordable homes like the one that Waiter and Manager live in. Nor does the playwright hesitate to employ a series of adorable woodland critters to decorate the action. Puppets representing a mouse, a deer and a bluebird urge the characters and presumably the audience on a journey toward goodness, true love and, in Jen’s case, activism.

But if daring to become an activist — the word is taboo in this dystopian Disneyland — is merely a way of salving liberal guilt, how meaningful can it be? A secret meeting of would-be do-gooders is treated just as satirically as Landlorde’s greed: The participants, wearing Mardi Gras masks, do little but argue over terminology and who should pay for the doughnuts. Their most coherent chant is “I care more about being cool than I do about social justice.”

Intercutting scenes of Jen’s moral dithering with scenes in which Waiter and Manager dither emotionally, the playwright convincingly suggests a world in which only evil is decisive. Jen can’t even figure out whether love is worth pursuing because it neither advances her professionally nor helps the world. It is, she concludes, outside her mission statement.

Madeline Wise, who has the wit and grit of a young Allison Janney, manages to keep Jen from becoming insufferable; she’s too real in her absurd self-questioning to dismiss. The rest of the (human) cast, including Ronald Peet as Gil, Annie Henk as Waiter and Elizabeth Kenny as Manager, generally walk the satire tightrope with confidence, neither falling into sketch comedy vacuity on one side nor undeserved pathos on the other. And the sui generis David Greenspan, luxury-cast as Landlorde, creates from his usual drawls and eccentricities a character that exists completely beyond those parameters.

Without astute comic performances like these the play might curdle before revealing itself fully as a fable for our times, about people so uncertain of the right path that they risk taking none. Like Jen, they are “unsure if self-hatred is productive or counterproductive.” A story that can make sense of such a twisted, contemporary statement is a story worth hearing.

But even for a fable, “Cute Activist” may be flirting with too much cuteness. The director, Morgan Green, who staged Cramer’s “Minor Characters: Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time” in 2016 and a revisionist version of “The Music Man” in Connecticut in August, has illustrated the action with as many tricks as the budget will bear.

Aside from the puppet animals — Cramer is one of the puppeteers — there are live video, recorded video, distorted audio, scenes set in the dark and a chanteuse (Deepali Gupta) wandering in and out of the action, crooning like Lana Del Rey. Likewise the set, by Meredith Ries, is more of a collage of images vaguely related to the theme (kindergarten chairs, an inflatable doughnut) than a way of anchoring the action in real places.

Of course, for much of the audience, anchoring “Cute Activist” in a real place would be redundant. They already know they’re in Bushwick, Brooklyn; they may already be struggling with the privilege that brought them there.

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Production Notes:

‘Cute Activist’

Through Feb. 3 at Bushwick Starr, Brooklyn; 866-811-4111, thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.

By Milo Cramer; directed by Morgan Green; music and vocal arrangement by Deepali Gupta; sets by Meredith Ries; costumes by Sabrina Bianca Guillaume; lighting by Cha See; sound, instrumental arrangement and orchestrations by John Gasper; video by Stivo Arnoczy; stage manager, Samantha McCann; production manager, Russell Maclin. Presented by the Bushwick Starr and New Saloon, in association with Clubbed Thumb.

Cast: Ronald Peet (Gil), Madeline Wise (Jen), David Greenspan (Landlorde), Annie Henk (Waiter), Elizabeth Kenny (Manager) and Deepali Gupta.