Laugh at love along with Edge Theater’s ‘Fast Girls’

While watching the play “Fast Girls,” you may find yourself thinking of the song “Maneater” by Hall and Oates.

It’s because leading lady Lucy Lewis is a bit of a man-eater. She’s not in it for love but for the fun. And she’s at that point in her life where she’s chewing through some boys. Not in a literal sense but a sexual sense. This is a comedic love story, after all.

In the end, though, Lucy finds that she is the one being spit out.

Lucy is the fear-of-commitment type in “Fast Girls,” a two-act play that continues at Edge of the World Theatre in Edmonds through Oct. 27.

This is a fast-paced comedy packed with quick wit and a couple of fast-talking women whose well-oiled tongues spin out one-liners quicker than you can say “I do.” The show’s clever dialogue, spiced with some delicious sexual tension and coupled with fine stand-up from Lucy’s mother, makes this Edge production one filled with guffaws.

Lucy Lewis and her friend and next-door neighbor, Abigail McBride, are single, live in Manhattan and are both zaftig-figured beauties. There, their similarities end. Once betrayed by a cheating husband, Lucy now has a revolving door of men (and sometimes boys) and has no intention of walking down the aisle anytime soon (see “Maneater” reference above). Abigail is unlucky in love, would love nothing more than a steady guy, and believes that most men she sees on the street are “serial murderers or married or orthodontists.”

To complicate her free-loving lifestyle, Lucy’s ex-boyfriend, Sidney, still pines for her, and her very Jewish mother so fears for her daughter’s future that she has flown in from Palm Springs to hold an “intervention.”

Lucy plays straight woman to Abigail’s funny girl, a gal who produces such great zingers as “Love is learning to say ‘Eh.’” The routine works well, almost a Lucille Ball-Ethel Mertz dynamic without the husbands. Lucy is played by Edge newcomer Katie Woodzick, whose performance was fresh and sweet and full of passion.

As Abigail, Kayti Barnett gives the hand-wringing and high-strung assistant school principal a real complex personality, one that uses comedy like a shield to protect her sadness, like a clown who might be crying on the inside. When we learn that Abigail has had two marriage proposals in her life but turned them both down, we’re not sure whether to laugh or cry when she says, “That’s before I knew that high standards and loneliness are the same thing.”

Lucy’s former boyfriend, Sidney Epstein, is played hilariously by Rick Wright. Though a bit of a control freak, Wright made us root for Sidney, who would make a good husband (once he gave up trying to be a writer and stuck with plumbing), and he certainly adores Lucy. And there would always be laughter in their house with jokes like these: “What did the elephant say to the naked man? Can you breathe through that thing.”

The other man in Lucy’s life is Joe, played by Gabriel Corey, who in his first appearance at Edge brought lots of comic talent from his time with the 5th Avenue and Village theaters.

The star of the show was Edge veteran Melanie Calderwood, who plays Lucy’s mother, Mitzi Lewis. As Mitzi, Calderwood continues her claim as the comic centerpiece for every show she happens to be in, delivering us the kind of classic Jewish mother that made us wish that “Seinfeld” was back on prime time. Calderwood is witty, wise and wise-cracking. She makes us laugh out loud and also makes us feel assured that now that Mom was here, everything would turn out just fine.

Reporter Theresa Goffredo: 425-339-3424 or goffredo@heraldnet.com.