Wrong Number

REVIEW: Philadelphia Theatre Workshop's 516 (five sixteen)

by David Anthony Fox

John Flak AN EDUCATION: Emilie Krause and Kevin Meehan in 516 (five sixteen).

News flash: The Ivory Tower is crumbling! Oh, academia may seem like a bastion of idealism, intelligence and honesty — but scratch the surface and you'll find a cesspit of cheating and low-stakes fraud. If this strikes you as a novel or interesting idea, perhaps you'll be entertained by Philadelphia Theatre Workshop's production of 516 (five sixteen), a new play by Katharine Clark Gray. If not, don't waste your time.

John Flak (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Meet Sigurd (yes, Sigurd), a stellar graduate student in media studies, who inexplicably hires an unqualified part-time undergraduate named Annalee to write most of his papers. He also plies her with aggressive sex in his dirty van. That's Act 1. Act 2 involves the discovery of this scam by the professor, followed by an absolutely incomprehensible struggle for one-upmanship.

Gray clearly relishes skewering the pretensions of media studies in particular and colleges in general. But for all of her smugness, she seems to know very little about how a university works (she's clueless about the difference between an M.A. and an M.F.A., to give only one example among many). The plot of 516 is preposterous, but that's not even the worst of it. There's endless dialogue that attempts to mimic what the playwright imagines is scholarly filmspeak. I'm sure she thinks she nails it, and that the result is fresh and hip. She doesn't and it isn't. "Did David Cronenberg spend 20 years making the same movie?" Annalee asks in her typically sneering, purely rhetorical way. (No, he didn't.)

The one element of 516 that seems all too real is the creepy, abusive core of Sigurd and Annalee's relationship, but deplorably much of that is played for laughs. It's not clear whether Gray intends for all three characters (including Martie, the professor) to be as unappealing as they seem here. I don't know and I don't care. I also don't know why the play's title, which is the number of one of Sigurd's courses, is written out in numerals as well as words.But I'm sure of one thing — as a play, 516 is a big fat 0 (zero).

Through June 6, $18, Philadelphia Theatre Workshop at Walnut Street Theatre's Studio 5, 825 Walnut St., 215-316-1361, philadelphiatheatreworkshop.org.