IndyFringe Festival has a short run of a play tracing a troubled gay-straight romance

Mythology rears its puzzling head in the very title of Ricardo Melendez's play "Angel on Eros," whose run of three performances closed on the last day of IndyFringe Festival's opening weekend.  Yet the play  is an enthralling exploration of a love affair with the transactional burden of many a real-world relationship.

Angel (pronounced An-hel) doesn't descend from on high to consort with the ancient Greek god of

Brezdyn La Dieu and Ricardo Melendez in "Angel on Eros."

passionate love. He is a Hispanic painter, perhaps Puerto Rican like his creator Melendez, who plays him with fervor and a twinkle in his eye. Sunday's performance had the creator's zest operating at full force. Melendez, formerly active as an Indianapolis actor-dancer,   is now producing director of Actors' Workshop of Virginia. 

And, true to the mischievousness of the deity the Romans called Cupid, Angel is open and "on Eros" to the seduction carried out by an unhappy married man in the neighborhood who operates a struggling small restaurant with his wife, Stacy. 

With a neediness that threatens that domestic partnership, Brezdyn La Dieu plays Matt in a two-hour romantic comedy that perhaps has too much of an agenda to stay within that genre. That's because, while Angel wants something that will propel him out of his blocked productivity and thus talks himself into a job as waiter, Matt wants much more.  He's a straight man longing for a buddy or two, hiding his susceptivity to a same-sex liaison and, as it turns out, quite capable of bigotry when his erotic adventurism might lead to exposure. He claims to love his wife, but the marriage sure seems headed for the rocks.

So, if there's any "grooming" involved, it may be Matt's self-grooming that's the culprit. When it happens that Angel can direct a popular food blogger's attention to the restaurant, business success and erotic triumph work in parallel tracks. Angel gets the benefit of relieving his painter's block away from the  studio, with the added bonus that when he returns to the easel Matt turns out to become his muse, his model and (for the time being) his lover. His fortunes as an artist lift, though he's warned by his connection to the art world to stay away from married men. 

The dialogue is fast-paced, excessively so in some places. The wit would strike sparks more consistently if there were more variety in the pacing. The rapport of the actors proceeds with a tightness that makes the fissures in the relationship feel inevitable. That could be the very point Melendez as playwright wants to make. Why don't straight men stay in their lane? is the implied question. 

Angel handles that pretty well, on the whole. He makes a final speech linking his integrity as an artist to his integrity as a man. The blank canvas before him is the ground of his being. It's an affirmation of personal identity that prevails despite the confusions and underlying prejudices of the straight world. Wariness is a weapon and a tool and sometimes a shield. 

Having told Alexa to stop the music when he was struggling to create, at the end he is confident in the voice assistant's helpfulness as his artistic mission moves forward. He cues Alexa and resumes painting. I'm not sure that Matt has found a comparable peace in his own sphere.

[Photo: Actors Workshop of Virginia]