Porno
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This two-act opens with the screenwriter-director, Ernie, rehearsing a cast of five variously horny, awkward, brain-dead, and overeager performers in a paneled, shag-carpeted basement. He hopes that his version of the great love story of Dido and Aeneas, filtered through Marlowe’s 1594 play, will be his masterpiece. In Graney’s lyrical, childlike blank verse, Ernie calls the tale “that magical something hoo humdingy / That’s beyond explanation.” But the performers are in it for the money, the drugs and booze, and the sex. When they discover in the first act that the unseen producer’s cash is counterfeit, they begin drinking themselves really stupid.
The story might seem like a collegiate goof, but Graney makes Ernie a rounded, pathetic character whose life has “turned out wrong.” He lives for one thing: to restore his sense of self-worth by re-creating a mythic love tragedy. But he has no money–or talent. He can get backing only from a mysterious German producer, who insists on making porn. Considering the sensuousness of Marlowe’s verse, Ernie is willing to compromise. Then the producer turns up in the second act and completely takes over.
