<b>TEA PARTY</b> Allendale Theatre/First Look Buffalo Theatre Company SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Through October 6
TEA PARTY First Look Buffalo Theatre Buffalo Company/Allendale Theatre

Life is a search for self, whether in kindergarten or that middle age purchase of an expensive sports car.
That’s for most of us.
For Sean Abley’s Frank (Andrew Zuccari) in “Tea Party,” he can’t talk about his search.
He’s a stressed-out worker in the small Montana town of Great Falls, with a stressed-out wife, Gayle (Kaylie Horowitz), obnoxious best friend, Justin (John Dellacontrada), and a hobby.
That’s where his life gets very, very tricky.
He’s a straight guy in a small town who likes to dress in women’s clothing and who can’t tell anyone.
Until…he meets Oliver (Bob Rusch), who cross-dresses and lost his marriage about that and who runs classes on the rules of pleasant life and etiquette.
That’s rules like how to pour tea and how much sugar to put in the tea cup, all while both are dressed in matching dresses, awful red and white checks.
Frank can’t quite understand why Oliver offers these lessons.
The teacher also has some sort of hangup about young girls, young students.
Abley leaves that dangling, with Oliver’s handwritten manual on the wall of Sarah Waechter’s set design.
Gayle knows there is something wrong but can’t figure out what it is.
Justin may have a secret but he wants Frank’s secret and thinks he figures it out and breaks into Oliver’s apartment to confront the two.
Frank pleads with him not to tell Gayle but he informs his best friend that telling his wife is a must and he does it.
We open one scene with Gayle sleeping on the living room couch, in the wake of Justin’s announcement.
Then, Justin has to admit and confront his own secret.
Gayle says all the women in their high school class knew, anyway.
Everyone has to move on and it won’t be easy after what was revealed.
Most of us have probably never met a straight cross-dresser (or at least we don’t know that we have) and it’s hard to judge Abley’s characterizations of the two in this play.
That means the impression of cross-dressers is shaped by the script, director Lara D. Herberger and Zuccari and Rusch.
Is it accurate?
Quite probably, since this isn’t the first production of “Tea Party” and if there were a script problem that would have been brought to the creative team or the playwright.
As far as the players are concerned, that might have been found and resolved during rehearsals.
Nothing pops out and both seem plausible.
Herberger has some strong performances from Dellacontrada, Zuccari and Rusch to make the show work, particularly Dellacontrada as the utterly slimy and untrustworthy Justin.
Waechter’s set works for the play, two different living rooms.
“Tea Party” is a fascinating play because it falls outside of the usual array of scripts on local stages.
That’s what makes it worth seeing.

A.W.

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