The women of 007 never looked like this before

PATRICK MCGARVEY/YH Not exactly the James Bond you remember from the movies.

It is a heady experience to realize, nearly a half hour into Oedipussy, the new show by Brian W. Robinson at the Cabaret, that you're watching a female James Bond square dance with her stepmother after killing her husband during a high-speed fling along an Alpine autobahn with Monica Lewinsky. And I don't mean because of the incongruities. The influence of Saturday Night Live and years of postmodernist posturing has accustomed us to far worse. What's different here is that it works--with unusual sophistication.

In truth, it could have been the high concept from hell: a marriage between Cold War machismo and the stoic mechanics of Sophocles is just asking for trouble. And sure, sometimes it's a rocky ride.

But the final joke may be that the two polar opposites in this enormous gamble of a "What If?" play aren't incompatible at all. The last laugh is on us. As inhabitants of a complacent post-Cold War world who demand the fantasy of heroic womanizer James Bond as mass entertainment, we want a constant devaluation of our heroes in mass market tabloids. And scandals don't get any more salacious than Oedipus.

That's essentially the premise of this short, wickedly observant show, the theatrical equivalent of a Naked Gun movie that hits the mark far more often than it misses. It's Robinson's courageous conceit that Tomorrow Never Dies missed the boat; any media mogul worth his tar these days would realize that domination of the airwaves means world domination. Political intrigue takes a back seat to self-promotion.

Robinson's villains, the Greek Oedi-pussy and her ridiculous eunuch sidekick Mr. Stick (inexplicably dressed as a bitter Mickey Mouse--but hey, no one ever questioned Odd Job's Ginsu haberdashery), attempt to infiltrate the media and use it for their own nefarious ends, "an Oedipussy infosaturation."

Dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, the two hate corporate greed but also want a piece of it for themselves. In a series of short scenes, juxtaposed with occasional interventions of a single-member Greek chorus, James Bond thwarts them simply by being his old, chauvinistic Brit self, which, in the media-happy '90s, is cause enough to both lionize and sensationalize him. Ultimately, Oedipussy is foiled by the fact that she's simply not interesting or beautiful enough to hold the temperamental camera's eye.

Robinson is smart enough to keep the pace so intense that the odd clichéd setup, failed line, or preachy exposition doesn't detract from the play's wholesale slaughter of pop culture. It's not as didactic as it may sound. You don't ponder Oedipussy so much as you get caught up in the infectious energy of its silliness and inspired plot twists. Why, for instance, is Bond's stepmother, who is married to a Swiss agent whom James hits with his Aston Martin early on, a ditzy, loquacious midwestern housewife who runs quilting classes for the criminal underworld? Who cares? It works.

You either buy the premise or you don't. And fine acting makes some of the product-ion's arbitrary choices easier to take. Adrienne Dreiss, as Oedipussy and about four other roles, is an enchanting chameleon of such range and comedic skill that she invests even goofy, throwaway roles with a passionate ardor that would make Stanislavsky proud. Allison Horsley's monotonous roué Bond starts to grate after almost an hour, although she certainly has the swagger and chin-raising arrogance to fit the bill. Casting a female lead as Bond makes us question the strange illogic of gender role assumptions in espionage escapism, but it also gets in the way. Exchanges like, "I cooked a cobbler," "Thanks, I don't eat men," take on a distracting resonance when homoeroticism just seems like another cultural critique layered onto a farce that pivots dangerously close to pedantry. And Robinson, as Mr. Stick and the sporadic Chorus, has a brilliant deadpan delivery that occasionally is taken too far. I get the point that, as the Chorus, he's assuming several roles at once without ever really inhabiting them. But some of his speeches are spoken with such rapid, disaffected diction that their potential humor value is lost. Dead-on lighting and sound by B. Wayne keep the show rolling at a thunderous pace without any interruptions.

At times, the whole production comes off as the greatest improv act ever imagined. The actors seem to be inventing it all as they go along, with an electric sense of lunatic oneupsmanship. "I'll bet you don't think I can top this," they seem to say, and then they do. But particularly when tripping over lines, the underrehearsed quality of the production takes away from a streamlined show that needs to feel spontaneous, not stilted.

Overall, it's an inspired libation for the gods, and definitely among the most consistently outstanding comedies Yale has to offer--funny, self-conscious, and utterly true to Bond creator Ian Fleming's nihilistic vision and the sadly consumeristic times we live in. As Bond himself might say, the best productions are those that live twice: as disposable comedy, and as subliminal, undeceived rant.

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