Spell #7

Considering how hot Stephen Adly Guirgis is these days, both locally (last season's highly praised productions of ''Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" and ''Our Lady of 121st Street") and nationally (sellout performances of ''The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" in New York despite mediocre reviews), it's no wonder theater companies are going back to the young playwright's earlier work.

Hats off, then, to Company One, which hopped the '' 'A' Train" last season, for bringing his 1997 play ''Den of Thieves" to our attention. It's a decidedly imperfect play and a bumpy production, but it nevertheless bears the imprint of a playwright who knows how to reach out to an audience that isn't all white and thinking about retirement.

Here we have a typically Guirgisian cast of lovable, multiethnic losers: Flaco, a wannabe Puerto Rican hip-hopper; Maggie and Paul, kleptomaniac overeaters in a 12-step program; and Boochie, a nymphomaniac exotic dancer. Flaco leads them on a heist that's supposed to be simple until the people they're intending to rob turn out to be Mafiosi who capture and threaten to kill them.

Guirgis excels in creating absurdist worlds where nothing is taken completely seriously. And yet he doesn't succumb to glibness or ironic excess. Each play is concerned with the characters' struggle to find their places in the world, both in mundane and in cosmic terms. In ''Den of Thieves," the four failed robbers have to explain why the world would benefit if Little Tuna, the doughnutophile gangster in charge, lets them live. According to his rules, one of them has to die and the other three must forfeit their thumbs.

The dialogue goes off on humorous tangents akin to the McDonald's rap in ''Pulp Fiction." The writing isn't as sharp as in '' 'A' Train" or ''121st Street," and the play bogs down at the end when it should be heating up, but ''Den of Thieves" is a vibrant and often laugh-out-loud funny piece of playwriting.

The cast is all over the place in terms of quality. Nicole Parker and Keith Mascoll need more seasoning in the central roles of Maggie and Paul. Mason Sand's hip-hopping Flaco is a riot. Tony Berg as hit man Sal could walk onto ''The Sopranos" without any trouble, and Molly Kimmerling's Kidman-esque body language is perfect as Boochie. James Milford and Kenneth McFadden as Little Tuna and Big Tuna are adequate, but casting African-Americans as Italians in the context of this play is taking diversity into awkward places.

Company One shares an aesthetic with LAByrinth Theater in New York, which produces Guirgis's plays and specializes in work that deals with multicultural characters, but Company One hasn't gotten to nearly the same place in developing the kind of ensemble casts that LAByrinth has.

If and when it gets to that point, Company One will be a crucial player in Boston's theater scene. Until then, ''Den of Thieves" offers a strong foundation to build on.

Ed Siegel can be reached at siegel@globe.com.

By Terry Byrne
Wednesday, April 6, 2005

Assumptions about addiction and recovery get turned upside down in Company One's hilarious production of ``Den of Thieves.''

The mobsters Little Tuna (James Milord) and his cousin Sal (Tony Berg) are affable nitwits, with Little Tuna proving he's not up to the role of tough guy, while Sal, wearing a little lacy apron, is happy to cook a roast or torture the prisoners with a chain saw, depending on what's required. When Big Tuna (Kenneth McFadden) comes home to find four prisoners alive in his basement, the game shifts back to Guirgis' earlier themes of addiction and recovery.

Guirgis wraps up his tale quickly and a little too neatly, but director VanDerzee keeps his actors at a consistent pace so that even when the script jumps from semiserious to cartoonish, everyone in this ensemble looks sharp.

``Den of Thieves'' offers a wild ride that may be ridiculous, but it's an awful lot of fun.

Bob Nesti

There’s certain chemistry between the work of New York playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis and Company One, the local urban-oriented fringe company that recently became one of the resident companies at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Two seasons ago a production of his provocative prison drama “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” helped put them on the map, winning them and actor Vincent Siders major accolades. Now they’ve hit comic gold with one of his earlier scripts, the broadly satiric “Den of Thieves” that plays like Quentin Tarantino on laughing gas.

Guirgis’s story centers on Maggie (Nicole Parker,) a depressive-type who has entered a 12-step program to control her chronic kleptomania. At the onset she’s failed miserably, having made a major hit on a local supermarket, and calls her sponsor, a straight-arrow-type named Paul (Keith Mascoll) for spiritual guidance. Having being a compulsive eater, smoker and, most significantly, a safecracker who learned his trade at the hands of his grandfather, Paul hopes to help Maggie end her compulsive behavior (and perhaps sleep with her in the process.)

What gets him back in the game is a plot hatched by Flaco (Mason Sands), Maggie’s crack-smoking ex-boyfriend, to rob a Manhattan disco of $750,000 with the assistance of Maggie, Paul, and Flaco’s current girlfriend Boochie (Molly Kimmerling), an airhead stripper. The robbery attempt ends up involving the Mafiaso owner of the club, Big Tuna (Kenneth McFadden), his son Little Tuna (James Milord) and his thuggish nephew (Tony Berg.) How they become intertwined makes up the play’s raucous second half, which manages to be both funny, suspenseful, and oddly touching at the same time.

As he did in “Our Lady of 121st Street,” his other major success, Guirgis mixes cultural stereotypes and off-the-wall humor to great success. Much of the play satirizes the world of 12-step programs, the Mob, and street-smart urban types; but what makes “Den of Thieves” so unusual is how a number of the characters are cast against type in a clever use of blind racial casting.

African American actors play Italian types who normally would be cast as if they walked out of the “The Sopranos;” and suburban white actors play the street-wise Hispanics. The result makes for some broadly played caricatures who deliver Guirgis’s sitcom-like lines with great panache.

The cast is uniformly funny, though Mason Sands nearly steals the show as the edgy Flaco, and is nicely matched by Molly Kimmerling’s brainless stripper. There are also nice comic turns from James Milord as the sensitive Little Tuna, Tony Berg as his boorish cousin, and, especially, Kenneth McFadden as the Mafioso leader.

Acting as the calm center around which the madness spins is Nicole Parker and, especially Keith Mascoll, an African American actor with sharp comic delivery and an effective deadpan demeanor that’s perfect for the part.

'Den' takes Company One in right direction