The Last Supper

For frustrated liberals (i.e., liberals), Last Supper’s menu is almost too tempting. When the dinner guest of some lefty grad students turns out to be a Hitler-loving racist, his sudden, sort-of accidental death gives them a taste for offing the world’s baddies. So they invite over virulent reactionaries—like the author of Women Call It Rape—and, if they can’t change their views, poison them. While we don’t quite buy that Golob’s young actors go in no time flat from geeks to killers, we absolutely do believe that these five are fast friends and, later, partners in crime. In Grant Sabin’s spot-on, thrift store–reeking apartment set, Golob has his impressive cast speak (sometimes too) sotto voce around a table, giving us an eavesdropping thrill. Of particular note are the almost glow-in-the-dark radiant Elaine Robinson as the badass and Phillip James Brannon as the bitter-sassy one.

Yet in the second half, playwright Rosen (adapting his 1995 film) loses his nerve. When a right-wing talk-show host—whose clips we’ve seen on TV sets mounted above (first-rate video work by Lucas Merino)—becomes the students’ latest guest, he unsettles them with a speech on the necessity of opposing viewpoints. The point: In only hearing themselves, they’ve become like their enemies. Rosen in effect equates a structural similarity between two extremes with their moral equivalence: Dismissing an antigay, pro-AIDS priest gets likened to the priest’s own one-sidedness. So we’re served a cop-out relativism that the comedy initially promises to complicate. Still, until those last bites, Supper more than satisfies.—Novid Parsi