Review: Dukes, Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce's Codependent Comedy Show

Along with the regular pre-show announcements at the SoHo Playhouse, the house manager has a particular warning at the start of Dukes: the show can’t begin until the two friends in the sixth row stop watching porn on their phones. The offenders stand, irate. “Does love between five women frighten you?”

These aren’t your ordinary belligerent audience members but Jane Wickline and Liva Pierce, the stars of Dukes (also the name of their sketch comedy duo), who quickly storm the stage. Weird, codependent versions of the performers, Jane and Liva are apathetic roommates longing for something to break up the ennui of the daily grind. “Chaos gives the day momentum,” they sing later in one of the many tunes that break out when Jane nonchalantly plops down at the full-sized keyboard in their living room.

Dukes is mainly a musical sketch show, but there’s a whiff of a plotline. Jane and Liva’s friendship is strained by the arrival of another sexually enticing neighbor, the psychic Cheryl (sometimes Pierce in a wig, sometimes invisible to the audience), and by the galvanizing news that the Magellan Crystal Goose, worth millions to whoever can find it, has vanished from the Met.

But the duo’s humor relies on following tangential thoughts down labyrinthine routes, so the storyline is, deliberately, more like storymush. Those tangents, though, are usually sung and frequently delicious, with impossible-to-predict jokes popping up with nearly every lyric.

During their opening number, a call-to-arms to pornographers to make more meaningful content, I tried to write down a couple of jokes that were particularly funny but found myself scrambling to transcribe almost the whole thing. “Show me a porn that lays out a new government,” they croon. “I want a porn that’s shot over twelve years like Boyhood.” Jane dreams of a video that will inspire her to have “one hand in my pants and the other on my chin like The Thinker.” And wouldn’t it be great to see a “less literal” porn where “maybe the actors turn into claymation in the middle or something mixed media like that”?

As that last line indicates, Dukes’s songwriting is not overly focused on syllable count or neat rhyming, and most of the melodies are sung, with unapologetic imperfection, to simple chords that Wickline plays with one hand. These are parodies of the idea of song, so jocularly and deliriously do the unbounded cuckoo ideas expressed clash with the expectation that musical ideas should be confined by chord progressions and song structure.

Sometimes, there’s special humor to be gleaned from specific song send-ups. One duet seems to reference B.o.B.’s “Beautiful girls, all over the world” hook when Jane and Liva swear, “Beautiful girls, I’m gonna rescue you/Everyone else, I might rescue you if I have time.” This comes after their double-date has ended with a double funeral due to a pizzeria fire. Keeping up successfully with the wild swerves—jokes gleefully masquerading as plot—can make for the heady feeling that you’ve been initiated into some sort of secret society of loopy logic. Laugh at their jokes and maybe they’ll be friends with you, too; Wickline, an SNL cast member who regularly appears on Weekend Update, and Liva, who seems to be the slightly more despairing friend in this version of themselves, have a charming rapport.

But even 75 minutes is a bit long for this kind of relentless pace, since there’s little in the way of an arc. One starts to worry they could just keep doing bits for eternity. The music, in its limited melodic variety, also grows a bit cloying once the initial ingenuity wears off.

If Dukes has a deeper through-line, it’s the underlying, terrifying aimlessness that Jane and Liva communicate about their careers and their lives in general. They’re helpless without their phones (in one number where they throw their devices off a bridge, they spend the day “asking bus drivers how to mail a letter”). How else will they waste as much time as possible at work? “I picture my death so often,” Jane sings of her workplace. “At least I’m safe inside this coffin.” That one rhymes, and it stings.

But this miniature musical, co-directed by Mabel Lewis and Henry Hornbuckle with a minimal apartment set inside a medieval-ish frame designed by Colleen Murray, is mainly here for a good time. And even when they’re sad, Jane and Liva can’t help making us laugh at the utter absurdity generated by their unique brains. “My life feels like—what’s the opposite of a glass half full?” Jane ponders. “Brisket?”