The play "Saving Kitty" -- Jennifer Coolidge makes it work

Saving Kitty, a play by Marisa Smith, at Central Square Theater, Sunday, August 2, 2015. Directed by Lee Mikeska Gardner. Starring Jennifer Coolidge. With Alexander Cook, Lydia Barnett-Mulligan, Lewis D. Wheeler.

A young woman who works as a TV or film producer brings her fiance, a rising evangelical school principle, home to meet her Manhattan parents. They are not happy, the mother is appalled and she works to end the engagement. This is a decent comedy, but the main reason it worked for me is Jennifer Coolidge. We didn't know anything about her film TV work. As the monstrous mother, she imparted a strange magic to her lines and the character. Jokes that really weren't funny became hilarious thanks to her intonation and edge. She was a combination tyrant and vulnerable victim at the same time. It's hard to imagine anybody else doing the role. It was a very good cast, but Coolidge covered over the play's flaws and made it worth seeing.

I have a problem with some of the premises of the play. The young man character (well played by Alexander Cook) is barely realistic as a committed evangelical believer. He gives no sign of actually having any faith, at least none that is much different from the others around  him (which is to say none). But the real problem is the mother, Kate Hartley. We are meant to believe that she lives by the liberal values of wealthy Manhattan. But that's not what we see. We see a bigoted, crass, neurotic blowhard from the very start. That she objects to her daughter's choice of an evangelical believer seems irrelevant -- her reactions and behavior didn't really make sense to me.

The Minions movie -- ten minutes of laughs at the start, then tedium

We saw the movie Minions (produced by Illumination Entertainment) last week, and laughed hard in the first ten minutes or so at the hilarious Minions creation story -- dinosaurs, slapstick armies, courage, fortitude. But sadly, the rest of the film quickly becomes kind of a bore. We have the three cute minions Stuart, Kevin, and Bob, searching for a meaningful life for their Minion tribe. But the level of jokes never goes beyond the Three Stooges, and never quite reaches the Stooges' level of plot and character (which is saying something). A few laughs here and there, but too predictable.

There's something ethnically odd about the yellow minion creatures. Their names -- Stuart, Kevin, Bob. British, or Anglo certainly. They do end up in England, and there are some Britishism jokes (the tea-drinking Bobbies in the absurd chase scenes, British accent jokes). So what is the British connection? And how come all the people in the scenes are basically white? I think the time was 1965, or thereabouts, but even then, I'm sure New York and London must have had lots of Asian and African faces. Is there some message here about the minions that I'm not getting?