A friend took me to see THE MILK TRUCK DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE Wednesday night and I have to agree with the reviewer from New York Magazine:
That Dukakis doesn’t consistently succeed has less to do with her powers of interpretation and more with the rich — sometimes too rich — strangeness of the text. (That said, I suspect her cotton-mouthed accent will divide audiences; personally, it grew on me.) Directed (and, to a certain extent, reconstructed) by Michael Wilson (The Orphan’s Home Cycle), Milk Train is an oddity. It was written in the early sixties, during the excruciating final days of Williams’s longtime lover Frank Merlo. The playwright had just enjoyed what would prove his last great critical and commercial success, Night of the Iguana, a play that bears several superficial similarities to Milk Train: a windswept promontory in a foreign land, a miasma of American hegemony, a lonely, still-libidinous older woman and a younger, off-course male redeemer/consort with spiritual pretensions that might actually be sincere. (Here, his name is Christopher Flanders, a wandering artist-gigolo who’s in the habit of “comforting” wealthy older ladies as they approach the grave: The Collection’s Darren Pettie has the stones to play this more-than-faintly ridiculous character completely straight, his stud’s entitlement shifting tactically into Zen submission.
What none of the reviews mention is that Darren Pettie, all too briefly, goes the full monty early in the show. It was without a doubt the highlight of the evening.