Word: beep
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Kitty and her husband Beep (Matthew Johnson '99) appear to be a normal, happy young couple, she a nurse and he a student doing medical research out of his apartment. But they're confined to their apartment because of a deep, utterly absurd paranoia: they are afraid of their next-door neighbors' dogs, which, at the end of the play, turn out to be small poodles. They have eight locks on their door (which, in a joke of short-lived appeal, are undone and redone far too many times), a telescope to spy on their neighbors and an unwillingness...
...course, it's amusing when Kitty, who is pregnant and has a nasty case of morning sickness, sends pails of vomit to the neighbors. It's amusing when Beep and Kitty call their neighbors and bark into the phone. It's even amusing when Kitty decides to send poison gas through the pipes, attempting to kill everyone in the building. But none of it's amusing for very long, since the same basic joke is repeated relentlessly...
...then turns out that the whole conflict has also occurred multiple times. At the end of the play, it is revealed that Beep and Kitty have been following these neighbors around from apartment to apartment for years. Each time, they make up a new problem about which to be concerned, complaining about everything from snakes to ants to poisonous spiders. And each time they also attempt to come up with a way of getting back at their neighbors. Beep and Kitty attack the neighbors' toy poodles in the street, bug their apartment and even spy on them from afar...
...Beep and Kitty are deeply nuts. They inhabit their own world, one that lacks meaningful contact with the real world. This realization is meant to be a true revelation, but by the time it's actually addressed in dialogue, most viewers have already decided this on their...
This might be more acceptable if the play had some more lasting, concrete substance or universal applicability, but in this respect it is noticeably lacking. Overall, it walks a thin line between reality and oddball fantasy, particularly since no one can tell when Beep and Kitty are lying or being serious. But then how do Beep and Kitty's obscure epiphanies about dying ("you go to a garden full of flowers") and other intangibles fit in with anything? For a comedy which ultimately revolves around one, oft-repated joke, the play asks a few more questions than it ends...