Two Fools

Gracie's a typical San Francisco lesbian. "I promised myself not to fall in love with someone who lives more than 45 minutes from my house by public transport," she tells Luna, a Costa Rican woman now from Amsterdam who visits San Francisco for a couple of weeks. When Gracie throws her promise to the wind, she winds up in what George Washington might have called a "foreign entanglement," but racism, homophobia, and immigration laws complicate what could otherwise have been a rosy S.F. affair. Gracie and Luna are likable and warm, as Emily Rosenthal and Adelina Anthony (respectively) perform them, and the play is salted with wry comedy about romance. But Terry Baum's script suffers from the same insularity of so much queer theater -- a glib assumption that anyone watching will automatically sympathize with the characters' (underdeveloped) problems. There's enough human drama in the story to fill two acts, but the intermissionless, 90-minute production feels overlong, simply because Baum draws her conflicts from dull stereotypes (how white waitresses treat Latinas, how writers "exploit" their lovers in fiction) rather than artfully, from life.