“Pink Champagne” as potent as whiskey

Recipe for Pink Champagne, the new Neil Haven Comedy:

Start with curdled estrangement between a gay father, Donald, and his conservative son, Gene. Add the coming out of Gene’s son Joey, a screaming fight between Gene and Joey, and Joey’s flight to his grandfather’s (Donald’s) house. Stir gently, sprinkle in numerous marriage problems. Bring to a boil and simmer for about two hours.

Uprooted Theatre, co-producer with the Milwaukee Gay Arts Center, premiered the show Thursday at the Tenth Street Theatre. Dennis F. Johnson directed.

Pink Champagne is a sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking story about a divided family. It’s a tale of coming out to your family and about marriage and what it can become. It’s the story of five people trying to live with one another. Haven renders these connections beautifully. My favorite was the relationship between the perfectly-cast Donald (John Kishline) and his husband, Patrick (T. Stacy Hicks). They gripe and bicker, squabble and make up like the old married couple they play. Haven saves his best one-liners for Donald (“Patrick maimed me with a cookie”), but the excellent acting from Kishline and Hicks makes them work.

Ari Shapiro shines as Joey, delivering a seemingly endless supply of pithy barbs to his blustery father, Gene (John Maclay). A real treat embedded in Pink Champagne is the evolution of the delicate relationships over the course of the show. The wonderful Maclay is in the middle of most of that.

The only discordant note came from Marti Gobel, as Gene’s wife, Corrine. Gobel’s amped-up performance seemed a bit over the top. Pink Champagne has a lot of shouting and invective, but as the show ebbs from family drama into desultory introspection, Gobel starts to seem out of her element. At the same time, Maclay gets better and better as the tone shifts from humor to sadness.

The play definitely follows an emotional arc, from Patrick comically flinging burnt cookies at Donald in one of the first scenes to the tense confrontations at the end of the play. Pink Champagne is billed as a comedy, and that’s how it starts. The early scene where Donald disgustedly reads an article from the Journal Sentinel about “ducks fucking in the park” was hilarious, and so are a lot of the other gags. But as more and more family secrets come to light, the show darkens increasingly. By the end, cutting inter-generational barbs of the most serious type have replaced the humor and wit.

Vicious though they are, these verbal brickbats are understandable. Haven has managed to mix well-rounded characters and excellent dialogue with an engrossing emotional tale. Pink Champagne offers not only fizz, but also a kick.

Tenth Street Theatre is on the lower level of Calvary Church, at 10th and Wisconsin. Curtain time is 7:30 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays, 8 p.m. Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, May 19-22, May 26-29 and June 2-5. Tickets are $15; order at the MGAC website. $3 off for students and seniors rush, one hour before curtain.