Characters wrestle with class in 'Stick Fly'

Drawing-room comedies are supposed to be classics from a post-Victorian era, in which amusing situations play themselves out in ways that don't leave lasting scars. Then comes

Stick Fly

, which opened Wednesday at Arden Theatre Company with all the genre's outlines, but whose characters rip into each other with the 21st-century precision of

Gods of Carnage

, plus African American directness.

The play has proved a viable property since its 2009 Broadway run (it's now being adapted by HBO), but that doesn't mean the challenges weren't formidable for Arden's Walter Dallas-directed cast. The theme of class struggle takes a new twist because it's set within the black community and is part of the characters' struggle to accept themselves as movers and shakers in their world.

The weekend-in-the-country plot involves a wealthy, hyper-educated family whose two sons bring their prospective spouses (one is white) to meet the parents. At one point or another, everybody turns on everybody. In effect, this literary tour de force by Lydia R. Diamond honors drawing-room's too-tidy-to-be-true plot turns, which gets even more challenging as her modern-character tensions become almost too messy to resolve.

The severe, traditional father (Jerome Preston Bates) can't believe his No. 2 son, Spoon (Biko Eisen-Martin), has opted to become a novelist. Spoon's girlfriend (Jessica Frances Dukes) fends off her lower-middle-class past with work as an esoteric researcher examining the lives of flies (thus the title). No. 1 son Flip (played by actor U.R.) is an accomplished professional, but he's too immature to keep his pants zipped. His girlfriend (Julianna Zinkel) is a virtuoso at playing hide-and-seek with the truth.

Certain running jokes don't hold up if you think about them too long. But the zingers seem all the wittier - guests are asked back for Christmas for "mirthful dysfunction" - when mixed in with blunt street language. And personality complexities are navigated with such clarity that the play becomes universal. Subsidiary issues are particularly colorblind - intellectual self-absorption for one.

Amid a handsome interior set by David P. Gordon, director Dallas has molded such a good ensemble that one of the breakfast scenes plays almost balletically, mainly because he trusts the script's character-based humor and knows how to make such scenes do an abrupt but graceful about-face.

Halfway through the second act, however, even this cast and director run out of new emotional colors to play, and the angst becomes redundant. That's partly because the drama rests on Joniece Abbott-Pratt's maid, the play's most thinly written character.

So Stick Fly isn't perfect. But can you imagine drawing-room comedy master Oscar Wilde handling such bad-ass characters?

Through Dec. 22 at the Arden Theatre Company, 40 N. Second St. Tickets: $36-$48. Information: 215-922-1122 or www.ardentheatre.org.

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