In the Garden

The only excuse for a pretentious Christ allegory about a homeless kid working as a hustler -- and involving himself in a soap opera love triangle with a professor, his wife, and her lover -- is refined high camp. You could almost get away with it by playing up the melodrama, in the style of a Mary Worth cartoon. Unfortunately, playwright Norman Allen and director Christopher Jenkins (who produced Hedwig and should know better) are dead serious. Gabe, the hustler, not only talks like a pompous altar boy and shows a weird fixation with one particular copy of a Good News Bible, he also throws sudden, unmotivated tantrums and takes off his clothes for no reason. Brian Trybom plays him dreadfully. The rest of the cast amounts to a gallery of Manhattan clichés: the stiff-jawed professor, the blowhard yuppie stockbroker, and the statuesque, fabulously superficial fashion editor. ("It seems our bed has been very busy of late," she quips when all the love affairs unravel. Indeed.) The script somehow won an award last year, after premiering in D.C., but not a line of it is original or even honest.