A Beautiful Home for the Incurable

It sounds like the beginning of a good joke: What happens when you take an agoraphobe (won’t leave home), a narcoleptic (falls asleep at inopportune moments), an apraxic (can’t do physical activities that take mental thought), and a temporary amnesiac (loses memory after sex) and put them together in a New York apartment with an identity-thieving criminal? The answer should be a side-splitting nut-ball comedy, but in the case of A Beautiful Home, the result is lackluster. Local playwright and director Ian Walker squanders his play’s potential with a lack of consistent characters and an unbelievable situation. Timothy Redmond, delivering the most solid performance as Bunny the agoraphobe, is wonderfully introduced as he painstakingly unlocks the four heavy deadbolts on his front door, but in later scenes he leaves the door unlocked or even halfway open. The language has a noncommittal tone, with G-rated terms like “moron” and “frickin’” and hokey, moralistic ponderings such as “Maybe we need to see ourselves through other people’s eyes so we can see we’re not damaged.” Second Wind’s production has many amusing moments, but ironically suffers from an identity crisis: It won’t commit to being outright hilarious or dramatic, and becomes insipid in the process.