Danny Pintauro - Bay Area Reporter 9/2000

Are you experienced?

One-man "The Velocity of Gary" at NCTC

by Richard Dodds

Who's the Boss? was an eight-year TV hit that no one seemed to watch. At least, no one I knew ever did. I did know that the stars were Tony Danza and Judith Light, and that there were some children on the show. Who could have imagined that one of those sitcom kids could mature into the canny theater artist on stage at the New Conservatory Theater Center?

Danny Pintauro, who played an uncomplicated adolescent on television is now starring as a seething mass of contradictions in The Velocity of Gary, Not His Real Name.

For more than 90 minutes, the 24-year-old actor holds the stage, portraying not only a naive gay hustler working Time Square, but also his colorfully varied friends and lovers.

Playwright-actor James Still created the one-man show as a vehicle for himself, and he performed it around the coutry for a decade. But the role of Gary seems tailor-made for the trim, slim, and diminutively appealing Pintauro, whose pudgy TV face has given way to a handsome angularity. On stage at least, Pintauro no longer looks like the boy next door.

Already on stage when the audience arrives, the scantily clad actor is dancing provocatively to a techno beat, his head jerking around to check out any new comers in the auditorium. When he first speaks, it's all come-hither braggadocio. He's experienced beyond his years, yet in many ways still a child.

We never learn much about where he came from, or even his real name. Both the past and the future are fuzzy for Gary, and he sees the present as an ongoing adventure where, he repeats, "anything can happen." But there are fissures in the facade that can reveals his longings for a tenderness that finds some fulfillment with a bisexual grifter who has "a voice like a saxophone fucking a cello"

The playwright may sometimes put an unlikely poetry into Gary's mouth, but mostly he finds a balance between vernacular authenticity and the need for theatrical expression. The play can also tiptoe to the edge of sentimentality, but always pulls back from the precipice. When a baby enters Gary's life and he asks her name, the mother replies "Hope... not her real name." A lovely moment, that.

Gary replays his story through a patchwork of flashbacks, and Pintauro expertly makes the emotional leaps, not only for Gary but for the other characters as well. There is a clean honesty to the young actor's work that is polished without seeming slick. The play is perhaps 10 or 15 minutes too long, a problem that can't be blamed on Pintauro or his resourceful director, .

The Velocity of Gary is a brave and challenging choice for a young actor who first found fame in a medium often devoid of those traits. The Velocity of Danny Pintauro is now at full tilt.