Cooking With Elvis

This new farce by British playwright Lee Hall was a hit at the Edinburgh Fringe four years ago, and seems to have nothing to do with Billy Elliot, Hall's more famous screenplay. A precocious and unbalanced 14-year-old named Gillian obsesses over cooking for her quadriplegic father, while her loucheand semialcoholic mother brings home a younger man to live with the family. The father, now in a wheelchair and insentient except for his hard-ons, used to be an Elvis impersonator. We get to know him mainly through between-scene musical numbers, when actor Lol Levy gets out of the wheelchair to do a pretty mean impression of the King. The deserving center of attention, though, is Gillian, played with a caustic, resentful, British-teenager wit by Lauren Grace. She's clever and watchful, efficient in the kitchen, cruel to her Mam, and secretly wet with lust for the maternal boy-toy, Stewart. Linda Ayres-Frederick also does strong work as Mam; she nails the Midlands accent and sways convincingly on her pumps. Only David Austin-Gröen (as Stewart) seems uncertain about the accent, but he makes up for it with good body language, and the result is a weird, surprising comedy in beautifully horrible taste.