Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed Extends at Second Stage

Second Stage Theatre is extending its production of Douglas Carter Beane's The Little Dog Laughed by four weeks. The show, directed by Scott Ellis, will now run through February 26.

In The Little Dog Laughed, an up-and-coming leading man Neal Huff and his over-zealous agent Julie White become entangled with a sexy young drifter Johnny Galecki and his naïve girlfriend Zoe Lister-Jones. On the play's subject matter, Beane explained in a recent press release: "It's sort of the last taboo--which movie stars are gay? Because everyone sort of knows it, but no one talks about it. The last time I was in L.A. I mentioned this play to a movie producer. I said 'it's about a closeted movie star' and [the producer] literally gasped as if I said it was about a mass murderer. He said 'Oh no, oh no--don't say that--don't talk about that.'"

The production opened to mixed to positive reviews on January 9. In his Broadway.com Review of the show, Rob Kendt wrote: "The strongest and most durable relationship outlined in The Little Dog Laughed, Douglas Carter Beane's brittle new comedy, is between a soft-edged actor, Mitchell Neal Huff, and his diamond-hard Hollywood agent, Diane Julie White. A professional bond that trumps all other entanglements is true to Beane's acerbic point about showbiz commerce and compromise, but I think the playwright also intends us to care about his characters' attempts to form extracurricular attachments. No dice. Instead, as he showed in his similarly undernourished and overpraised As Bees in Honey Drown, Beane has the wit's curse: a congenital mistrust of sincerity which can be as distancing as it is bracing."