You come away regretting that no one had argued against it so well while it was happening, but greatly relieved that now that it may be over, if you can’t laugh at yourself for not having been able to stop it, you can at least laugh at the idiots who did it.

But the play isn’t one long browbeating review of the war on terror, it’s a great comedy built on:  woman wakes up to discover she married a stranger the night before.  He is muslim, very skeevy, and gets threatening at the mention of annulment or divorce.  Not allowed to go to the police, she does convince him that they should go meet her parents, who are wealthy.  The groom is deluded enough to think he may be marrying into money.   The father is a conservative crackpot, the mother is a delusional housewife in denial.

Sounds crazy, absurd, and none too pleasant.  But Durang is a master at pulling humour out of the absurd and gross and painful.  Nothing is ever too painful for more than a second, just long enough to get to the absurdity.

The play could have ended before the “rewind” sequence.  The rewind sequence tries to tell us how things might have turned out if the characters had acted with, well, I guess more honesty.  It gets boring and long. We know we can’t go back and fix anything.  We can only move forward and pay the consequences.  The play would have been stronger, had it been left at that.  Go see it, tell me if you agree.