HotelMotel

Let's say you have four hours to kill and want to spend it in the company of 20 strangers in an over-air-conditioned hotel room while oher strangers get naked very, VERY close to your face. Conveniently, your desires can currently be fulfilled at HotelMotel, a pairing of two (long) one-act plays at the Hotel Gershwin being put on by the spunky hipster troupe The Amoralists.

I first found out about them a year or two back when their show The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side got some serious traction while playing P.S. 122. The show got really strong reviews from the Times and a bunch of other outlets, while also garnering a fair amount of attention for a prolonged nude scene during which one of the actors was visibly stimulated. About that scene: while it was certainly included for shock value, it was also one of the funniest moments in a play that had no shortage of laughs. Bottom line: the group had a bargain basement aesthetic and a go-for-broke spirit that was legitimately infectious. Pied Pipers wasn't a perfect play, and the performances weren't the cleanest or most well-developed that I'd ever seen, but you couldn't help but be won over by their commitment and nerve (and I'm not just talking about the nerve to go onstage with a hard-on).

I next saw them do Adam Rapp's Ghosts in the Cottonwoods. This time, I hated the play itself, but I still fell for the cast and the sense that they would never give less than there all. Also: lots more naked people. Everybody's got a gimmick!

Point is, I'll probably see whatever they do because there's an integrity and spirit to their productions that can't be faked. When I found out they were doing a pair of shows for an audience of 20 at a time in a hotel room off Madison Square, I was down for it in a heartbeat, even as I was concerned about getting taken out by some flying setpiece. I should mention that their shows are also MESSY.

HotelMotel is made up of one play by Derek Ahonen who did Pied Pipers and one by Adam Rapp. I figured I'd love one, hate one, but I found that I actually enjoyed both--one slightly less than expected and one a ton more than I thought I would.

Ahonen's piece, "Pink Knees on Pale Skin" is about a sex counselor who stages therapeutic orgies to help people work through their marital troubles. Naturally, she has terrible problems of her own that are boiling beneath the surface. Sarah Lemp is a mainstay of the Amoralists, and she's terrific as the counselor, even though she gets stuck with a lot of the clunkiest pieces of exposition. Here's the problem: the play didn't say anything terribly new. We had a couple where the husband cheated and one where the wife couldn't orgasm because of deep-seated mommy issues. Both were therapized with admirable hilarity but also a hefty dose of EZ-Bake psychology. Most interesting about the entire show was, in fact, the therapist's inability to feel fulfilled, but that was dealt with in a pretty rapid-fire ending scene that felt like a tease for what the play could have been. Nick Lawson, as the therapist's stuttering teenage son could not have been better, even though he only had a short scene. And Joshua Tisdale was fantastic as her husband who spent most of the play hiding under the bed, waiting to surprise one of the couples. Which he did. Fully nude. And I'll just say it--he's a damned good looking man IN clothes. Out of them...there are no words. Well, not ones I'd be comfortable using in public.

Adam Rapp served up "Animals & Plants," and I'll start with the downside before I move on. The symbolism in this play is roughly as subtle as a shotgun blast to the face. And the longer the play runs, the more you're assaulted with it. Hey, look--there's a man wearing a bear skin surrounding the space with stuffed foxes in predatory poses. I wonder if people might start acting in animalistic ways soon... BUT. The play also had some incredible dialogue--highly stylized, I've watched GoodFellas too many times, no one actually talks like this dialogue, but I'll be damned if it wasn't incredibly funny and super-effective largely due to the two strongest performances of the night--Matthew Pilieci (of the Pied Piper erection) as good-time goombah Burris and William Apps as the socially maladjusted but totally endearing Dantly. The play didn't come with a lot of surprises, but it did have the requisite bloodshed, laughs, and (you guessed it) naked people.

Here's the thing about the Amoralists--they occasionally come across as a but juvenile with their reliance on shock value, high volume, and occasional gimmickry. And they may not perform the best material. But I can't think of many other performers who deliver the goods straight from the gut every time. I admire the crap out of them, so yeah...I'll be back for whatever's next.