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.

In Passing

Colin Farrell, Joel Edgerton and Viggo Mortensen in Thirteen Lives.

This piece includes reviews of Thirteen Lives,The Good Nurse,Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and The Pale Blue Eye.

At the outset of Thirteen Lives, Ron Howard’s dramatization of the 2018 Tham Luang Cave rescue in northern Thailand, we see the twelve pre-teen and teenage football players and their coach enter the cave and then the monsoon begin to batter it. But then Howard and the screenwriter, William Nicholson, make an unconventional choice: they don’t show us the trapped souls again until, about halfway through the picture, the British divers, Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) and John Volanthen (Colin Farrell), come upon them near the mouth of the cave twelve days into the ordeal, when many participating in the story or following it on the news fear they must be dead. Naturally the filmmakers understand that presenting the facts of the narrative from the point of view of those outside the cave is dramatically effective, but I think there’s an ethical dimension to their showing us what Stanton and Volanthen discover as they discover it. Howard and Nicholson strive to avoid melodrama; they don’t want to rev up the audience by cutting back and forth between the deprivations the footballers are suffering and the efforts of the crew – a wide, disparate combination of divers, Thai Navy SEALS and other military, police officers, volunteers of every stripe and the representatives of about a hundred government agencies – to track them down. They are resolute about draining Thirteen Lives of sentimentality; I wouldn’t say there’s none at all, but given the nature of the material there’s remarkably little. It’s a film of great integrity as well as tremendous skill. And the subject matter is so gripping that you’re grateful for the foreknowledge that the coach and all the kids got out alive. (One of the SEALS, Saman Kunan, played by a charismatic young actor named Sukollowat Kanarat, did not survive the operation, and another died a year and a half later of a blood infection he contracted during it.)