Theater: “To My Girls” @ Second Stage
Gay people have made tremendous strides in the last decade. We can legally marry, adopt children without the world raising an eyebrow, run companies like Apple, serve as Secretary of Transportation, and play openly on professional sports teams. In other words, we’ve become mainstream.
Unfortunately, we can also write lousy plays, and JC Lee’s “For My Girls” at Second Stage is one of them.
Four bicoastal millennials rent an AirBNB in Palm Springs from Bernie (Bryan Batt), a sixty-something homo who has decorated the house in florid Jonathan Adler. The friends include studly Curtis from WeHo (Jay Armstrong Johnson) who is an “Insta-Gay” with a gazillion followers; Leo (a tall Black guy from New York who looks terrific in a fright wig); and Castor (Maulik Pancholy), a South Asian wannabe playwright living in the Valley and currently employed as a barista. “I’m actually a shift supervisor,” he protests, huffily.
They crack wise (a la “Boys in the Band”), drop references to Britney, Liza, and Miley, and after getting properly drunk, start bringing up old
grievances. There’s also a new one: Castor has brought sexy Omar (Noah Ricketts) home from a club. But Omar winds up sleeping with Curtis instead. Oh, the humanity!
Fortunately, Pancholy who plays Castor is comedy gold, with the ability to make the nonstop wisecracks even funnier than they’ve been written. Still, despite the witty references to social media and current pop music—they try really hard to be au courant here, folks—the story of gays as victims and neurotics seems as old as a Judy Garland concert. “To My Girls?” Sorry, not an Aug Critic’s Choice.