Watching Kristen Schaal and Kurt Braunohler reminds one how few male-female double acts there are. Which is a shame: as this short show proves, it can open up deep wells of comedy – such as the heterosexually charged repartee that forms much of this set. The show splices a spoof playlet about a fatal romance with irony-sodden sketches that usually revolve around the febrile but undeclared erotic charge between the two. "No thank you," squeaks the girlish Schaal. "Just pure platonic comedy for me, sir!"
Combine this dynamic with Schaal and Braunohler's idiosyncratic humour, and you have the makings of a great comedy show. And the makings of a great show are precisely what we get. The pair's so-called play, Double Down Hearts, is entirely inconsequential. Its three scenes, performed in reverse chronological order, recount the doomed love between a compulsive gambler and a man with a harelip. Much funnier, and performed with the same infantile-delinquent devilry, are the intervening sketches, in which Schaal and Braunohler perform the transcript of colonist John Smith's dirty-talk phone conversation with Pocahontas ("Pocahontas, I'm so glad you called") or feign romantic tension between one another: "I'm talking about this now because you will only look me in the eye when we're on stage."
The joke extends to the suggestion that Schaal is lonely, and the audience must compete to take her on a date. The contrast between the pair's gawky personae and this strain of something darker is rich and discomfiting, as if Schaal and Braunohler were pre-teens dressing up in S&M gear. What's frustrating is that the show lasts only 45 minutes, five of which are hogged by a screened episode of the duo's home-video series, Penelope: Princess of Pets. The pair's relationship makes for wonderfully impish comedy, and after only three quarters of an hour, it's hard to accept the end of the affair.
