The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay.

David Javerbaum, the longtime head writer of The Daily Show and the playwright behind An Act of God, has turned his attention from the divine to the canine, and the result is The Dog Show: Come. Sit. Stay., a funny, tender, and sometimes surprisingly sad evening at the Triad Theater. Directed by Richard Israel, the show is a series of monologues told from the dogs' point of view. It is staged simply, with stools, music stands, and a picture of each dog displayed above the actors, who read from scripts because, as we are told early on, it is very hard to get a dog off book.

About two dozen dogs are represented over the course of the evening, and while I can’t cover them all, a few of my favorites deserve mention. At the 9:30 performance I attended on November 12, Todd Cerveris opened the evening as Merritt, a terrier with an MFA from Tisch who serves as the show’s producer. He returned later as Moose, a Great Dane convinced that he is tiny, whose nervous apologies to “Mr. Audience” made him one of the most memorable dogs of the night. Gizel Jiménez stood out as a five-week-old puppy who uses her cuteness as a weapon, and again as a Rodeo Drive purse dog who comes to realize she is an accessory to an accessory. Angela Reed made her mark as Duchess, a toy poodle who insists that winning Westminster is no big deal, and as Lassie, looking back on a career spent pulling people out of wells. Jordan Matthew Brown covered perhaps the widest range, from the Great Sniffini, a mentalist who reads the audience by scent, to a frisbee-chasing dog whose one perfect catch carries the whole history of dogs and people inside it.

My cast was phenomenal. With little more than a stool, a music stand, and a script to work with, each of the four performers fully embodied the dogs they portrayed, moving from one breed and personality to the next and giving every dog a voice and temperament all its own. The show’s website lists new cast members stepping in on select dates, including Seth Rudetsky and Danielle Ferland later this month, and I am seriously considering a return visit to see how other actors bring these dogs to life.

I found something to relate to in nearly every dog that night, whether they made me laugh, moved me, or left me a little sad. The one exception for me was Rambo, a German Shepherd police dog giving a scared-straight talk to a room of at-risk kids. The writing is sharp, but this is a subject I feel strongly about; I have no issue with dogs trained to sniff out drugs and other contraband, but I have a very hard time with dogs being used against people. That reaction is more about me than about the show, and taken together, the evening still made for a touching night of peeks into the minds of dogs.

The evening took me through more feelings than I expected from a show about dogs. Much of it was pure delight, the kind of laughter that comes from recognizing exactly what a dog would think if it could tell you, and a few of the monologues had me laughing harder than anything I have seen on stage in a while. Some of that laughter came with real affection mixed in, a warmth for these dogs and their devotion to the people in their lives, even when they misread those people completely. More than once I found myself smiling at a dog’s innocence while also feeling protective of it.

Other stories went somewhere harder, and those are the ones I am still thinking about. There were moments of pride and heartbreak arriving at the same time, moments of loss that the dog understood less than I did, and at least one story that was hard to sit through, though it left room for hope by the end. The show is not afraid to be sad, and it trusts its audience to sit with that sadness before offering comfort. By the closing moral, all of those feelings had folded into something I can only describe as gratitude, and I left the Triad feeling grateful for what dogs give us.

As a dog lover and dog owner, this show hit home for me in many ways.

The Dog Show runs through November 29 at the Triad Theater, and I hope an extension is in the works. The production has also announced "pooch seats" at each performance for an owner and their dog. Any dog lover, or anyone who loves animals, should go.

I purchased my ticket through a discount ticketing service.