PLAYING IT STRAIGHT
By Brian Lipton, January 31, 2008

Married couples, take note: You never know when an offhand comment will lead to a full-length play. Or so says Paul Stroili, the author-star of the solo piece Straight Up With a Twist, now at NYC's Players Theater. "One day my wife said I was like the gay friend she gets to have sex with, and soon it became dinner party conversation for the ages, and then it started me thinking about this play," says Stroili. "There's this whole group of men who want to be regular guys -- we don't want to be metrosexuals -- but who when watching a football game are more concerned with whether the guests have enough sandwiches than who scored a touchdown. I felt this was a segment of men who were being overlooked and I could speak to them."

Stroili, who was raised in the Bronx and Connecticut in an Italian family, says sex is the reason he's that kind of guy. "I made the mistake as a young man who wanted to get laid during the height of the women's movement in reading Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan and really believing that women wanted us to be sensitive and didn't care if we knew how to use power tools. By the time I realized -- or they realized -- they didn't really want that, it was too late."

Stroili road-tested the show in Chicago, his former hometown, and his now-native Los Angeles for eight years, but he is really finding New York audiences to be unusually appreciative. "It didn't occur to me or my wife or the producers that the characters in this show really are New York-based, so here we have much more of audiences recognizing themselves or someone they know; what we call the nudge factor," he says. "And the gay audiences have been great; they've been laughing so hard. There's one segment in the show which is a mock game show called "It's All Geek to Me," and we bring up two guys. If one is gay and one is straight, it really becomes this hysterical clash of the titans."