Local Theater’s production of Topher Payne’s new comedy is a theatrical feat on many levels
The widely anticipated Local Theater Company world premiere of Topher Payne’s new play You Enjoy Myself hit the ground running Saturday night at Boulder’s Dairy Arts Center. The packed house was full of instant fans of the work and featured quite a few members of the Colorado theatre community to cheer it on — not to mention a few Phishheads.
The comedy, which rests on a solid platform of Phish fandom, delivers plenty of laughs while having at its core a deeply emotional and affecting tale of human connection played out by six inter-related characters.
But they don’t all know they’re connected yet, and Payne’s cleverly constructed script introduces us to them one by one before starting to join the threads that lead to a roof-raising reveal and reunion at the end of Act One. As directed by Betty Hart, You Enjoy Myself is a tour de force resulting from close collaboration between director, playwright and cast — and it’s hard to overstate just how well this whole piece comes together following its initial reading at the company’s Local Lab in 2022.
As Payne told me on the OnStage Colorado Podcast recently, he isn’t a fan of the band Phish himself but was introduced to them by an ex who was deeply passionate about not just the band but the community surrounding it. It’s been built up over several decades as the jam-band diaspora recovered from the death of Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia in 1995.
The Musician (Joe Mazza) and Judith (Eden Lane) in ‘You Enjoy Myself’ | Photo: Michael Ensminger Photography
It’s important to note that one doesn’t need to know much about Phish to enjoy You Enjoy Myself — but it doesn’t hurt. There are quite a few bits of the band’s lyrics throughout the show, with the actors doing a good job of highlighting them by their delivery and reactions.
The first character we meet isn’t a person but an old farmhouse we later learn is in Vermont. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a larger and more complex set in the Dairy’s main theatre but the set design by Susan Crabtree is a finely detailed work of art. It’s a beat-up old house, maybe something inhabited by hippies, with a myriad objects strewn around it and a gate with the legend “Leave your bullshit at the gate” warning visitors and the house’s occupants to keep it real.
Easier said than done as we are drawn into the story that kicks off with the sole occupant of the house, Judith, narrating what’s to come with strong hints that music will be a big part of it. A seventh character is The Musician (the show’s music director Joe Mazza) who accompanies the action on guitar and only occasionally reacts to the action on stage. Judith is played by Eden Lane (Colorado Public Radio’s A&E correspondent in her Colorado stage debut) as a melancholy loner who speaks almost in monotone — as if her essence has been sucked out of her. But there’s much more to learn about this character, a storyteller who provides color commentary between scenes while later revealing a layered and complex identity.
We soon meet a much livelier character in Eileen (Anne Sandoe), a woman of a certain age who’s had a one-nighter with a much younger man after partying down at a Phish show. Wearing only her panties and a T-shirt (not hers), she’s hungover as hell and discovers she’s somehow thrown her back out. As she struggles to untangle herself from the sheets and stand up, her fling wanders in from the shower asking if she wants breakfast. This is session musician Archie — a delightfully dippy and well-cast Ryan Omar Stack. When he leaves to forage for tiny yogurts and waffles in the hotel, Eileen takes the opportunity to get the hell out of there with what’s left of her dignity.
Fresh from coitus, we next meet Isabel and Jasper — Iliana Lucero Barron and Jihad Milhem — a couple in a long-term relationship that’s headed for the rocks when Jasper, in a monumentally blockheaded move, tells her he’s had a fling with someone else. But, he adds, he thought it was OK because they’d once had a conversation about the five “free pass” celebrities they’d each get to bang given the chance.
Isabel’s bestie is Cory, a stereotypically gay wingman who’s quick to urge her to dump Jasper and burn his clothes. Bobby Bennett is a sharply funny as Cory, the character Payne vested with many of the zingers who can be counted on for comic relief when the going gets awkward — as it so often does.
Cory (Bobby Bennett) and Isabel (Iliana Lucero Barron) are besties on a mission. | Photo: Michael Ensminger Photography
Barron plays Isabela as a conflicted fireball, and she’s a ton of fun to watch in her scenes with Cory. Isabela’s fraught relationship with Jasper plays out in an entirely different tone, and Milhem is great as the doofus hetero dude desperately trying to find the right words.
By the end of the first act, we know Isabel and Jasper are a couple on the brink, that Jasper and Archie are road buddies about to head off on a tour and that Cory, who’s “divorced well” is free to help Isabel recover. But after that first scene, Eileen is nowhere to be found until near the end of Act One, and it takes some time for the reveal as to where Judith fits into the whole mess.
But it starts to come together quickly when Isabel and Cory decide the best course of actions is for her to bang one of the celebs on her list. Picking a favorite author named Scott Sheridan, they set out for Vermont only to find no sign of the writer at the house featured on the cover of his novel. It’s just Judith, the jaded resident who’s tired of Sheridan fans showing up and who threatens to turn the hose on them.
When all six of them wind up together at the farmhouse, it’s a master stroke by Payne who ends the act with a string of expletives as the characters are suddenly confronted with a heap of uncomfortable revelations.
Jihad Milhem and Ryan Omar Stack are musician buddies with a few things to work out in ‘You Enjoy Myself.’ | Photo: Michael Ensminger Photography
Given the strength of the first act and the decisive way it ends, I wondered if the rest of the play could keep pace. But it does, not only working through some of the issues the characters have with each other but also introducing a brand-new relationship along with a rekindling of a very old one.
There are a lot of moving parts physically on stage as well as a whole palette of human emotion laid bare in a fast-paced series of scenes. But Hart has a firm grip on it all, and despite being over two hours, the pacing is crisp and the show holds the audience’s attention throughout as the comedy takes a few pages from the whodunit genre to reveal all.
Eileen (Anne Sandoe) is working to resolve some past issues at the old farmhouse. | Photo: Michael Ensminger Photography
You Enjoy Myself features a terrific ensemble, with every actor finding not just the character’s personality but also the hidden pain they all share. Perhaps the one with the most to divulge is Eileen, and Sandoe makes up for her time on the bench in Act One with a number of revelatory moments as she and Judith dredge up their own extremely complex past. Trying to reconcile the pantyhose-wearing businesswoman she is today with the freewheeling and free-loving Phishhead she was in the ’90s isn’t something she’d planned to do, and watching her and Judith hash out the past with new information from the present is one of the play’s highlights. Lane has a lot more to show emotionally as Judith comes to terms with the decades-long emotional prison she’s made for herself, and the actor manages this complicated calendar well as she and Sandoe follow the script’s well-constructed path to resolution.
Without giving too much away, there’s also a very interesting dynamic that grows between Archie and Cory I did not see coming. The two characters have one highly memorable scene that goes from zero to 60 with astonishing speed but that’s also highly believable given the actors’ skill. I always enjoy seeing Stack on stage and now I’m eager to see what Bennet appears in next.
Topher Payne has written a quintessentially American play that hits the many notes of today’s sexual fluidity, confused pronouns, baffling notions of masculinity, femininity and everything in between. At its heart, though, it focuses on the need for connection and meaningful relationships that’s been a standard of storytelling for millennia. As Phishheads will tell you, the beauty of their clan is the ability to gather around one central passion, and in You Enjoy Myself, that glue makes for a brilliant jumping-off point for a highly enjoyable and insightful night of theatre.
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