New Plays: Tell Me I’m Not Crazy and The Hunt

Mark Blum and Jane Kaczmarek in Tell Me I’m Not Crazy. (Photo: Joseph J. O'Malley)

The four characters in Sharyn Rothstein’s new play Tell Me I’m Not Crazy, playing at the Nikos Stage in Williamstown, represent two shaky marriages and two generations of a contemporary Jewish-American family. Sol (Mark Blum) is at loose ends after coming to the end of a career in human resources. His wife Diana (Jane Kaczmarek), an elementary-school teacher, hoped that Sol’s retirement would allow them to spend the kind of quality time together that his job has prevented but is dismayed to discover that they’re more distant than ever – and that their sex life has dwindled to nothing. Their son Nate (Mark Feuerstein), having failed to find his niche in the photography world, has been playing the role of caregiver for his two young children while his wife Alisa (Nicole Villamil) pursues a career in advertising that demands more and more time away from the family. When their three-year-old’s behavioral problems at daycare prompt immediate action, it’s Nate who has to carry the ball. Both marriages threaten to implode when Sol, distressed over some recent home invasions in their nice middle-class neighborhood, purchases a gun. Alisa and Nate stop bringing their kids over to his folks’, Diana throws Sol out of the house, and rather than back-pedal on his vow to take extreme steps to keep his family safe, Sol exacerbates the problem by joining a neighborhood vigilante group.

Rothstein has a talent for funny one-liners, and for the first half-hour or so (the play runs an hour and forty minutes without intermission) you think she’s onto something: a satirical comedy about couples trying to negotiate gender roles in the twenty-first century – as well as racial realities, since Alisa is Hispanic and Sol’s anger and paranoia about the danger to his suburb provokes him to assume that the perpetrators must be illegal immigrants. Rothstein keeps piling on more and more issues and revelations, and the only way the play could possibly support all of them is in the form of a nutty absurdist comedy that keeps threatening to go off the rails, like the ones Christopher Durang is famous for. Instead it gets more and more serious and you stop believing in it at all. I think that happens as soon as Sol comes clean about joining the neighborhood enforcers, a totally implausible development for this character except in an absurdist work. The play is a mess. The dramaturgy falls apart completely in a series of second-act scenes where each of the characters makes an announcement that, we find out five minutes later, is actually a lie. It feels as though Rothstein is making it all up as she goes along.

Something New, Something Old: Seared & The Petrified Forest

Michael Esper and Hoon Lee in Seared. (Photo: Daniel Rader)

The glimpse of the restaurant world proffered by Theresa Rebeck’s new play Seared (at Williamstown Theatre Festival) is just as delicious as the dishes credited to the chef, Harry (Hoon Lee). Harry is misanthropic, egotistical and neurotic. His partner in this small but impressive Brooklyn restaurant, Mike (Michael Esper), who furnished the cash for the venture and handles the finances, has to put up with his endless quibbling, his eruptions of temper, his perverseness (the moment a critic praises his scallops Harry stops cooking them), his anxiety (Mike avoids telling him they’re expecting a major food critic until the last possible minute – and then the results are disastrous), his expectations of privilege, and his endless pseudo-philosophizing. Mike does so because Harry is a culinary genius – but his partner’s conduct, in addition to the stress of keeping a restaurant afloat, is making him crazy and preventing him from sleeping at night. When he hires a consultant named Emily (Krysta Rodriguez) to, as they say, take the place to the next level – adding more tables, printing menus rather than settling for a chalkboard so that Harry can make last-minute decisions about the offerings – Harry views it as a betrayal and an outrage. But she stays, and it’s clear that her contributions are having the desired effect, even if everything she suggests strikes Harry as pandering. The fourth member of the crew is the waiter, Rodney (W. Tré Davis), who is almost always in the impossible position of trying to stay loyal to both Harry and Mike when they’re on different sides of an argument.

White Christmas and Seared: Another Go-Round

The cast of White Christmas at Boston's Wang Theatre.

 

I saw Randy Skinner’s stage version of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas nearly a decade and a half ago when it swung through Boston on its pre-Broadway tour (at the time Walter Bobbie was listed as co-director) and again five years ago, when I reviewed it here. It’s back in Boston, this time in an even larger space, the Wang Theatre, formerly the home of the Boston Ballet, and I couldn’t resist taking another look. The show has lost a little of its freshness, or perhaps it’s just that the Wang has swallowed up some of its intimacy; the comic bits – not the high points of the David Ives-Paul Blake adaptation of the 1954 movie perennial – feel somewhat rote. But it’s still a charmer and an undeniable crowd pleaser, and I had a lovely time reacquainting myself with it.

Bernhardt/Hamlet: The Player’s Life

Janet McTeer in Bernhardt/Hamlet. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

It’s hard to imagine that devout theatrephiles wouldn’t fall for Theresa Rebeck’s new play Bernhardt/Hamlet, which has just completed its run at the Roundabout’s American Airlines Theatre. It’s a gossipy, diverting backstage comedy, set in 1897, about Sarah Bernhardt’s decision, relatively late in her career, to play Hamlet. Rebeck has taken considerable liberties with the historical facts. In her version Bernhardt (played by Janet McTeer) and the neo-Romantic playwright Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner, hamming with fervor), in several of whose plays she starred, are also lovers, and she begs him to rewrite Shakespeare’s text for her so that it’s more prosaic; she complains that she’s getting mired in the poetry. And the play builds to a second-act encounter with Rostand’s wife Rosamond (the talented Ito Aghayere, impressive in Mlima’s Tale at the Public last spring), who begs her to liberate him from the task, which is driving him to distraction and getting in the way of his completing Cyrano de Bergerac. It doesn’t matter very much that these details are Rebeck’s invention, since Bernhardt/Hamlet has a grandiose, tall-tale style and the narrative ideas are very amusing.

Bits and Pieces: Love, Love, Love and Tiger Style

Richard Armitage and Amy Ryan in the Roundabout Theatre's production of Love, Love, Love. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Love, Love, Love is a Mike Bartlett play from 2010 that is only now receiving its first American production, by the Roundabout Theatre in its off-Broadway space (Laura Pels Theatre). Bartlett, who wrote Cock and Wild, as well as the acclaimed King Charles III, is one of the most talented of the current generation of English playwrights, and I had a fine time at this play for the first two acts, which are a highly stylized comedy of manners. In act one, set in a north London flat in 1967, a straight arrow named Henry (Alex Hurt) invites a woman he’s been seeing, Sandra (Amy Ryan), home for dinner, only to see her fall for Kenneth (Richard Armitage), the hippie kid brother he’s been putting up, with escalating exasperation. In act two, set in 1990, Sandra and Kenneth are married and living comfortably in suburban Reading with their two teenagers, Rose (Zoe Kazan), who is anxious about everything, and Jamie (Ben Rosenfield), who’s affable and skin-deep. The marriage falls apart by the end of the act, after they’ve owned up to infidelities on both sides.

High Comedies: Six Degrees of Separation and Present Laughter

Allison Janney and Corey Hawkins in Six Degrees of Separation. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The current Broadway revival of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation begins badly and doesn’t find its feet until its leading lady, Allison Janney, does – about two-thirds of the way through, during her reading of the speech that gives the play its title. The play, a brilliant high comedy, is about the way a young hustler named Paul disrupts the lives of a number of people whose paths he crosses, most (but not quite all) of whom belong to the New York elite of the last decade of the twentieth century. Paul is an outsider in every conceivable way: he’s black (race in this play equates to class), gay and homeless. When a moneyed M.I.T. undergraduate named Trent Conway picks him up on the streets of Boston and takes him home, Paul makes a deal with him – sex in exchange for information about the prep-school classmates in Trent’s address book, now enrolled at various Ivy League colleges. (Trent is delighted to furnish details: not only does he consider he’s getting fair return for the favor, but his sexuality has always made him feel like an outsider too; he fantasizes that he can turn Paul into such an appealing faux aristocrat that when Trent shows up on his arm everyone will just have to accept them both.) Then Paul presents himself at the doors of their parents, bleeding from a self-inflicted stab wound he says he incurred during a mugging, claiming to know their children. He also professes to be the son of Sidney Poitier, and all of the aristocrats whose homes he’s entered on false pretenses are sufficiently impressed to take him in for the night. Paul is a scam artist and a narcissist; he’s also, it turns out, delusional. He starts to believe he really is Sidney Poitier’s son, and then he believes his other invention: that he’s the illegitimate son of Flan Kittredge, the art dealer who, along with his wife Ouisa, shows him the most kindness. Six Degrees of Separation is about connection and imagination as well as class (a theme of all high comedy). But it isn’t centrally about Paul. He’s the catalyst whose interactions with those he comes across – Trent and the aspiring, adventure-seeking young actor from Utah, Rick (Rick and his wife Elizabeth also take Paul in, when they find him sleeping in Central Park) and the Kittredges – act in various ways on their imaginations. The protagonist of the play is Ouisa, who undergoes the most profound change as a result of meeting him.

Hither and Yon: Theatre Round-Up

The Cast of Goodspeed's Bye Bye Birdie. (Photo: Diane Sobolewski)

This piece contains reviews of Bye Bye Birdie (Goodspeed Opera House), Alice in Wonderland (Shaw Festival), The Stone Witch (Berkshire Theatre Group), and Romance Novels for Dummies (Williamstown Theatre Festival).

Framed by Daniel Brodie’s nostalgic projections that reminds us what we saw on TV in 1960, the revival of Bye Bye Birdie at the Goodspeed Opera House is a little uneven but quite enjoyable, and I don’t think that the director, Jenn Thompson, can be faulted for most of the problems. Time hasn’t been kind to Michael Stewart’s book, a satirical take on the pop-cultural phenomenon of Elvis Presley and his imitators that felt fresh as the country cartwheeled into the sixties and for at least a few years thereafter. Stewart was inspired by Presley’s 1957 army induction. When Birdie is drafted, Rosie, the quick-witted secretary to his combination manager-songwriter Albert Peterson, comes up with the idea of picking one teenage girl from the legion of Conrad’s fans to receive a goodbye kiss from him on The Ed Sullivan Show, guaranteeing that the song with which he serenades her, “One Last Kiss,” will become a big enough hit to bankroll Albert’s departure from the music business and enable him to marry Rosie – a fiancée almost as long-suffering as Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls – and realize his original dream to become an English teacher. The adolescent they pick at random, Kim McAfee, has just become pinned to her jittery boy friend, Hugo Peabody. Conrad’s descent upon her small Ohio town, Sweet Apple, doesn’t just unnerve Hugo; it puts all of the teenagers into a state of hormonal hysteria. Albert’s possessive mother, Mae, who views Rosie as competition, arrives on the scene, too, to block her marital plans.