By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

So here's the question: since plays filled with simulated homosexual sex (complete with male frontal nudity) are rarely seen on local stages, would you rather see a bad production than no production at all?

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Answer that one and you'll know whether you want to trot down to Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art to catch Shopping and ... (There is another word in the title.)

The provocative title brought in the Cincinnati Fringe Festival's biggest crowd to date on opening night (and tickets are selling well), but Hand-Dog Theatre, in from Columbus, makes a mess of this contemporary British drama with a combination of bad casting and worse direction.

There's enough in Shopping to attract an alternative theater audience. It has big questions like, is everything we feel chemically induced? And that can mean caffeine, nicotine, uppers, downers, carbs, mad cow. Are there any feelings left?

Can one successfully substitute shopping for sex? Transactions for relationships? The Net and the Web for human contact?

Playwright Mark Ravenhill wavers but ultimately decides connection is worth it because it's all his play's scruffy and soulless band of pals have.

Hand-Dog makes do with a few black cubes in a variety of re-arrangements to set the scenes. Shopping runs just over 90 minutes without intermission.

Mark (Kekoa Kaluhiokalani, not precisely good but smooth and interestingly undernourished) is trying to kick his drug habit, making his best pals Lulu and Robbie (Dana Scurlock and Luke Mess) absolutely the wrong company. Lulu is the kind of girl who responds to a knife attack on a store clerk by shoplifting a candy bar.

Through one thing and another, Mark takes up with Gary, an absolutely miscast David Beukema, who doesn't look or act 16, or abused, or capable of behaving with an animal's innate defense mechanisms.

It's Mark who believes in transactions not relationships but he falls hard anyway. It's Gary who drops his pants on several occasions.

Meanwhile, Lulu and Robbie take up with Brian (Mike Holmes) who is supposed to be both sentimentalist and sadist, a man devoted to proper etiquette and profit at any price. The role calls for grand style, which Holmes doesn't exhibit.

Kaluhiokalani does double duty as director and there's nothing to suggest that he understands dramatic rhythm, but with Beukema so dead wrong in such a key role, the production starts out with a severed limb.