Josh Piven's 'Muddled' at Drexel University's URBN Annex

Saturday Night Live should sue

The 100-minute comedy, set mainly in a Brooklyn basement bar, plays like a Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch -- right up to the awkward ending, in which the cast bursts into singing "Those Were the Days," the familiar All in the Family theme. Actors weren't visibly reading cue cards as on SNL, but the practice would have prevented some slowness and fumbling at the show's third performance.

Muddled begins in 1987 Akron, Ohio, when metal band Black Widow's drummer Nicky (Bob Heath) deserts his pregnant groupie Tina (Amanda Schoonover). Thirty years later, their progeny Andy (Trevor William Fayle) runs a hipster bar with a strict no-electronics policy -- and no customers. Andy knows who his father was, since middle-aged mullet rockers come looking for him, but apparently never heard of Google and is completely surprised when his father shows up, transformed into a rich real estate mogul who's purchased the building.

However, shallow Andy has no questions about his father's abandonment. Tina is understandably pissed and suspicious but just as clueless. Twists and complications, though not much hilarity, ensue. Unmotivated revelations spill out on cue. That lost feeling from all except trusty veteran performer Schoonover -- like they're driving a car without steering or brakes -- is generated by a script written from joke to joke without concern for character growth, everyday logic, or reality (for example, the dialogue makes no accommodation for the time necessary to make a drink).

The last time 100 minutes felt this long, I was enduring a root canal. At least Dr. Godick numbed me first.

Gags to make us gag

Piven clutters Muddled with gags of the throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks variety and spray-with-a-firehose satire (both, again, SNL-like): Nicky's read Das Kapital by Groucho Marx (not Karl, haha). Carlo Campbell plays Nicky's security guard, doing all sorts of frantic Secret Service shtick. Hannah Gold is Andy's girlfriend and waitress, and also an inspiring actress hoping to play Eleanor Roosevelt, though it seems like no one involved knows who she was. If that was the joke, I missed it. Richard Chan plays a variety of ridiculous hipsters using smart phones and iPads simultaneously. Dave Fiebert and Eric Cover are former bandmates still stuck in the '80s, still sporting ridiculous hair. A hipster customer asks, "Do you serve anything in a Mason jar?"

Piven thoughtfully includes the dictionary definitions of "muddled" in the program. It means a "disordered or confused state," and is also a bartending term for mixing ingredients by smashing them together. Piven proposes a third meaning: Muddled is a mess of a play.