Suburban Peepshow

2007

While sitting through yet another living-room drama about the endlessly fascinating troubles of suburbanites, you find yourself longing for pirates to crash through the kitchen window or zombies to shamble through the front door and chew the protagonist's face off.

—David Cote, Time Out New York

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This quote from Mr. Cote — along with some weird autobiographical fodder, Steven Soderbergh’s film Schizopolis and Blake Edwards’ A Shot in the Dark — rattled around in my brain for quite some time before writing the play you are about to see tonight.

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This is usually the space where I make some last-minute pontificating about the script and the process of staging said script before Nosedive Productions unveils it to the public, but this show really needs no introduction. Still, we’re so used to reserving a page in the program for me to natter on at you I figured I’d still use this space to say “hey” and to offer a quickie intro.

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Nosedive Productions’ previous play was The Adventures of Nervous-Boy (A Penny Dreadful), a pitch-black comedy that delved into horror. For those of you who saw that play and are now expecting to see Nervous-Boy 2: Anxious in Vegas, I’m afraid that you will be sorely disappointed. This is a full-on flat-out silly comedy.

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Sure, it could be argued that this play examines how the more people fight against stereotypical roles the more they get locked into them. One could also contend that Suburban Peepshow is about infidelity and the inner lives of bored suburbanites. You could also make a case that the show seeks the “kernels of truth” in the clichés surrounding the nuclear family and theatre itself. And yes, someone could even maintain that the play explores the alienation caused by the cookie-cutter lifestyle of the suburban family and the rat race of the corporate work environment.

But these are really all beside the point.

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The main goal of me writing this was to make myself laugh.

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The main goal of Nosedive Productions staging this is to make you laugh.

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I hope you have as much fun watching this play as I had writing it and that you enjoy Mac Rogers’s curtain-raiser comedy, “Trailers,” as much as I did when Mac handed it in.

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Cadence. Heh. That’s a good movie.

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Liking that a lot,

James “Lovable Idiot” Comtois