Meteor Shower is Comedic Comet – Luminous and Lovely, then Over

Meteor Shower is hilarious. It is one of the funniest shows I have seen on Broadway and one that fully utilizes the medium. It isn’t a transfer or remake or reimaginering of some other piece. It is a wholly unique show.

Writer Steve Martin has produced sympathetic roles that are stereotypical, somehow both over the top and completely believable. Director Jerry Zaks has let this perfect cast loose on these roles, letting them play broad without dissolving into farce.

Amy Schumer and Jeremy Shamos play married couple Corky and Norm, a married couple from Ojai (a small spa town in the foothills of the California Coast). Corky and Norm are aggressively normal, neurotic South Californians, complete with moments of confessional discussions of marital and personal aggressions. They even start the evening with a pre-wine, you know, the wine before the guests arrive - so it doesn’t count. They both play the “straight man” to the high wire act of craziness provided by Keegan-Michael Key and Laura Benanti.

Keegan-Michael Key, Jeremy Shamos, Amy Schumber & Laura Benanti (photo: Michael Murphy)

Key and Benanti play Gerald and Laura, the supersaturated ids of competitive marriage. Gerald and Laura have been invited up to Ojai to watch a coming meteor shower, the darkness in the country more conducive than the city lights of Santa Barbara. They arrive with mayhem on their minds. There is pure joy watching Keegan-Michael Key pontificate on the relationship of the cosmos to his own self-worth. You are swept up in the pure, uncomfortable oddness of the moment.

Meteor Shower provides a bountiful accounting of how far very normal and nice people are willing to go to accommodate the unexpected. Then, after the first third or so, the play tilts your expectations and reruns some of the previous interaction from a slightly different angle, with slightly different results. The replay signals that the audience is in for an multilayered experience rather than a singular narrative.

Gerald and Laura enter again, with more exposition, but different results. The confusion of both Corky and Norm is now reflected by the audience. Here the play spins off into ever more dubious realities, which Schumer and Shamos struggle to cope with. The audience has no problem following, because each moment is funnier than the last.

Go see Meteor Shower to watch fantastic comedic acting. Amy Schumer is simply hilarious as Corky, but is matched by the cast. Everyone involved seems to bring out the best in each other. The laughs will stay with you a long time, the memory of the show might not.

Meteor Shower | Playwright: Steve Martin | Director: Jerry Zacks | Cast: Laura Benanti, Keegan-Michael Key, Amy Schumer, Jeremy Shamos | website