Bob's Theater Blog

D+

The final play in MCC’s season at the Lucille Lortel Theatre marks the debut of Matthew Perry (TV’s Friends) both as playwright and as New York stage actor. I wish I could say that his dual debut were more auspicious. MCC’s promotional material describes this “bittersweet comedy” as follows: “An alcoholic, an escort, a self-diagnosed neurotic and a well-intentioned dimwit walk into a bar... “ That would be the forlorn Perry, the luscious Jennifer Morrison (ABC's Once Upon a Time), the hilarious Sue Jean Kim (Aubergine) and the laid-back Quincy Dunn-Baker (The Wayside Motor Inn). In a rapid succession of short scenes, we learn what happens when they pair off into two unlikely couples. I could not get past the implausibility of a gorgeous, smart woman settling for a downbeat older lush. The pairing of an tightly-wound texting addict with an easygoing construction worker was only slightly more plausible. The play’s prevailing levity turns darker near the end, but then reverts to a predictable happy ending. Kim and Dunn-Baker do wonders to flesh out their basically one-note characters. Morrison does reasonably well with the thankless task of making her character seem believable. Perry is a notch below the others. While a failure on many levels, the play does have some good one-liners. Derek McLane’s revolving set cleverly lines the walls and even the ceiling with squares of wine and liquor bottles. Sarah Laux’s costumes are apt. Lindsay Posner's direction is brisk, perhaps to prevent us from having too much time to think about the play’s flaws. Matthew Perry is apparently still a big draw; after the play the street was crowded with people outside the stage door. Running time: one hour 45 minutes; no intermission.

C

Anna Jordan’s prize-winning drama about three members of a British underclass family and their neighbor is having its New York premiere in an MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. Hench and Bobbie are teenage half-brothers who are living alone and unsupervised in their alcoholic diabetic mother Maggie’s flat after she moves out to live with her current boyfriend. Hench (Lucas Hedges of “Manchester by the Sea” in an impressive stage debut) is a sullen, emotionally constricted 16-year-old who has nightmares and wets the bed. Bobbie (the impressive Justice Smith) is a hyperactive potty-mouthed 14-year-old (in London the character was only 13) who has unspecified special needs. The boys spend their time playing violent video games and watching porn. Their unseen dog Taliban, so named because he is vicious and brown, is confined to their spare room because he bit someone the last time they let him out. The brothers spot Maggie (Ari Graynor, who looks too pretty and kempt) passed out on the street and bring her in to sober her up. Later the boys are visited by Jennifer (Stefania LaVie Owen), a sweet-dispositioned 16-year-old neighbor, recently arrived from Wales, who is concerned about Taliban’s possible mistreatment. She becomes friendly with the brothers, particularly Hench, who also is stirred by feelings for her. It all turns out very badly. The production is ill-served by an intermission that disrupts the play’s flow. Somehow the play gained 20 minutes since London, where it was performed without a break. The thick working-class British accents and, to a lesser extent, the Welsh accent are challenging. The plot has a few contrivances that make no sense. The brothers have to share one shirt, because they left their laundry with their grandmother the day before she disappeared with her immigrant boyfriend. Was one of them running around shirtless that day? There is too little context for the characters. We never learn what demons bedevil Hench or, for that matter, why he is called Hench. Trip Cullman (Punk Rock) commits one of the cardinal (at least in my book) sins of directing: shining bright lights in the audience’s eyes. The set by Mark Wendland is efficient but uninspired. The costumes by Pamela Young are apt. When it was all over, I had to ask myself what was the play’s point. Is it just a slice of life about the British lower classes? A screed about the evils of porn and video games? A cautionary tale about bad parenting? Judge for yourself if you are so inclined. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including intermission.

I wish I had not read the rapturous Chicago reviews of this offbeat musical by Brooke Maxwell and Jacob Richmond now playing in an MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theater. My expectations were so high that I ended up being slightly disappointed. The plot is unusual in that the characters are all dead when the show begins. Six teenagers from the chamber choir of St. Cassian School in Uranium City, Saskatchewan have just been killed in a freak roller coaster accident. They find themselves in a macabre purgatory presided over by The Amazing Karnak (Karl Hamilton), a mechanical fortune teller who has the power to grant one of them a return to life. Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg (Tiffany Tatreau), born to hippie parents, is an obnoxious overachiever. Constance Blackwood (Lillian Castillo), the chubby nice girl, is Ocean’s best friend. Noel Gruber (Kholby Wardell), the only gay boy in town, idolizes Marlene Dietrich. Ricky Potts (Alex Wyse), a nerd with a physical disability, dreams of being an intergalactic superhero. Mischa Bachinski (Gus Halper) puts on a tough act but is a romantic at heart, longing for his fiancee back in the Ukraine. Finally, there is the mysterious Jane Doe (the vocally blessed Emily Rohm), who was decapitated in the accident, whom her fellow students do not recognize and whose body remained unclaimed. Each teenager sings a song to make the case for being the one chosen to return to life. The eclectic score has a wide variety of styles from pop rock to hip hop to faux Ukrainian folk song. The performers are all appealing. The scenic design by Scott Davis is wonderful, as are the costumes by Theresa Ham and the projections by Mike Tutaj. The choreography by Rachel Rockwell, who also directed, is lively. Why then was I slightly disappointed? In trying to tell us enough to care about each character, the show occasionally loses momentum. The interaction between the students and Karnak drops out for an extended stretch. The ending somehow did not have the impact I anticipated. Nevertheless, there is much to admire, particularly for a younger audience. If you liked “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” which I was reminded of, you will probably enjoy this show. Running time: one hour 40 minutes; no intermission.

Neil LaBute’s new play for MCC at the Lucille Lortel Theatre is really just an hour-long monologue for an actress on the far side of 50. But when that actress is Tony winner Judith Light, who’s going to complain about it? Light plays Mrs. Johnson, a long-time high school English teacher and counselor, looking back 15 years to a relationship that profoundly affected her marriage, her career and her soul. To say more would be to give away too much. Those expecting the usual dose of bile and surprise from LaBute will be disappointed. Light is impressive — just learning all those lines is amazing — but her performance is too often overheated with few quieter moments to relieve the intensity. Rachel Hauck’s set recreates a high school office convincingly. Emily Rebholz’s has dressed Light plausibly. I wish director Leigh Silverman had gone for a wider emotional palette. Running time: one hour, no intermissionion.

“The greatest act of courage is to love” or so say two characters in Noah Haidle’s absurdist family dramedy at MCC Theater. We see how four generations of a Grand Rapids family grapple with this challenge. In the first act, we meet Violet (Robin Tunney), accidentally pregnant, on the verge of giving birth to male twins any day. Her 14-year-old daughter Beauty (Taylor Richardson), whose daily diet includes bark, dirt and paint, announced three years ago that she had nothing more to say and hasn’t spoken since. Her husband Daniel (Brian Hutchinson) secretly feels overwhelmed and, as we learn from the narrator Footnote (Zachary Quinto), is about to abandon his family. The colonel (Tom Bloom), her father, has been sliding into dementia since the death of his wife. The first act ends with an attention-grabbing scene in which the two fetuses (Hutchinson and Quinto), dressed as vaudevillians, sing Sondheim, philosophize and express their fears of leaving the womb. If I had left at intermission, I would have been content. Unfortunately, the second act heads off in directions that I found unsatisfactory, jumping forward and flashing back in time and mixing characters from different time periods in the same scene. There is one particularly confusing actor doubling and another character who does not age for 75 years, all to little discernible purpose. Mimi Lien’s scenic design employs a lot of pressed wood. Asta Bennie Hostetter’s costumes are wonderful, especially the ones for the twin fetuses. When presented in Chicago, the play was such a success that the Goodman Theater moved it from its small stage to its mainstage to ecstatic reviews. Although the current production has the same director, Anne Kauffman, something seems to have been lost on the trip east. The New York cast, entirely new, seems competent so I am not sure they are to blame. I wish the play had been able to maintain the promise of its first act. Running time: one hour 40 minutes including intermission.

It’s almost exactly two years since John Pollono’s play “Small Engine Repair” made a big splash at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. That testosterone-driven tale of three working stiffs in Manchester, NH and the college boy who crossed their path packed quite a wallop. (And it made my 10 best play list for 2013.) The new play, also produced by MCC Theater, could almost serve as a bookend. We are back among the working class in southern New Hampshire, but this time it’s the women who hold center stage. During a nor’easter that has made driving perilous, sharp-tongued Maggie (Piper Perabo), who is struggling to hang onto a place in the lower middle class, discovers that her 10-year-old Honda is missing. When she reports the theft to the police, they alert her cop ex-husband Lou (Ebon Moss-Bacharach) who turns up uninvited with his annoyingly perky second wife Penny (Meghann Fahy). Linda (Tasha Lawrence), Maggie’s equally foul-mouthed mother, who lives with her, repeatedly demonstrates her skill at getting under people’s skin. It turns out that the car thief is none other than Maggie and Lou’s teenage daughter. The set rotates from Maggie’s modest house to a motel room in Connecticut where we meet a pair of high school classmates who have run off together. More specifically, the brassy girl (Lizzy Declement) has talked the innocent boy (Josh Green) into driving her to Florida for a rendezvous with her much older boyfriend. He has reluctantly agreed because he has been smitten with her since second grade. The scenes alternate between Maggie’s house and the motel room. Maggie and Lou learn that the Honda has been involved in a major highway accident, but the power goes out before they can learn how their daughter is. Back at the motel, things have turned romantic. I won’t reveal the outcome except to say that there is a tricky development near the end that I have mixed feelings about. Two of three theater-savvy friends who attended the same performance missed it, so I think director Jo Bonney needs to do something to make the ending clearer. I wish the actors didn't need to struggle so hard with the New England accent. Richard Hoover’s revolving set and Theresa Squire’s costumes capture the correct ambience. While this play is not as good as “Small Engine Repair,” it’s consistently involving and entertaining. Running time: 95 minutes, no intermission.

After a highly acclaimed London run that included a West End transfer, Jennifer Haley’s mashup of a police procedural and a sci-fi story is now having its New York premiere in an MCC production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. The Nether is what the internet has become in the near future, an online medium where virtual reality is the main attraction. Since trees have disappeared in the real world, even the sight of an online forest can offer comfort. Schools have been largely supplanted by interactive educational games. As on the internet, porn is an important part of The Nether. As the play opens Detective Morris (Merritt Wever) is interviewing Sims (Frank Wood), a man she suspects of operating a virtual realm called The Hideaway, a Victorian estate where avatars of pedophiles can anonymously have their way with children. One issue raised is whether, since the “children” are actually avatars of adults, there is anything immoral about it. The detective is also questioning Doyle (Peter Friedman), a school teacher in his 60’s who frequents The Hideaway, offering him immunity if he will provide evidence to nail Sims. We also meet Woodnut (Ben Rosenfield), an undercover agent sent to gather evidence, and, most notably, Iris (Sophia Anne Caruso), a nine-year old at The Hideaway, much favored both by “guests” and Papa (Sims’s avatar). There are some surprising developments. It all sounds more interesting than it turns out to be. After reading the ecstatic London reviews, I feel that the problem is a deeply flawed production. The set, by Laura Jellinek, concentrates on the drab interrogation room and merely gives us hints of The Hideaway’s charms, whereas in London the scenic design went to great lengths to show its seductive beauty. Another weakness, at least for me, is Wever’s performance, which I found monotonously off-putting. To see Peter Friedman and Frank Wood is, as always, a pleasure. Rosenfield is quite effective and Caruso is amazing. Jessica Pabst's costumes are excellent. Anne Kauffman’s direction did not pull things together for me. A botched opportunity. Most memorable line: “Don’t tell me that you never fucked an elf!” Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission.

When I saw two previous plays by Simon Stephens (Harper Regan [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2012/09/harper-regan.html] and Bluebird [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2011/08/bluebird.html}) at the Atlantic Theater, I thought his work was moderately interesting. When I saw his adaptation for the stage of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [http://bobs-theater-blog.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-curious-incident-of-dog-in-night.html], I thought his work was brilliant. Therefore, I was looking forward to seeing the New York premiere of this 2009 drama, which received almost unanimous raves from the London critics. To say I was keenly disappointed with this MCC production would be a major understatement. Those who wish to avoid spoilers should stop reading here. One London critic described it as The History Boys meets Columbine, a comparison that is an insult to the former. Both plays are about the stress of English public (i.e. private) school students preparing for their A-levels, but all resemblance ends there. The teenagers in this play are all stereotypes: Bennett (Will Pullen), the bully; Cissy (Lilly Englert), his compliant girlfriend; Tanya (Annie Funke), overweight and usually overlooked; Chadwick (Noah Robbins), the bullied nerd; Lilly (Colby Minifie), the new girl with a dark secret; William (Douglas Smith), the troubled boy with a casual relationship to the truth who wants to date her; and Nicholas (Pico Alexander), the handsome jock that she prefers. The author puts them together in a pressure cooker and we wait to see who will explode. The final scene introduces the lone adult character, Dr. Harvey, played by David Greenspan, who, for once, manages to avoid his usual excesses. In a country where school shootings were not almost weekly occurrences, perhaps the play seemed more profound. For me it seemed merely extremely unpleasant and tedious. I will grant that the young cast is very good. The dialect coach Stephen Gabis got excellent results from them. Director Trip Cullman has not helped the play by tarting it up with the actors running around in animal masks between scenes. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes; no intermission (wise decision).

The poster for Neil LaBute’s new comedy, now in previews at MCC Theater, is doubly misleading: the four actors do not end up in bed together and Fred Weller does not have hair on his chest. The play raises the question of whether the world really needs another satirical look at the denizens of Hollywood. They are both too easy and too frequent a target, unless the playwright has some new insight to share. That is not the case here. Steve (Weller) is an obtuse 50-ish action film hero whose fight against Father Time has led him to marry Missy (Gia Crovatin), an ex-cheerleader and would-be actress less than half his age. Since Karen (Elizabeth Reaser) came out as a lesbian, her movie career has been on the skids, despite her attempts to pump it up with a cookbook, website, charitable activities and marketing ploys. Her lover Bev (Callie Thorne) is a film editor with a pugnacious personality, to put it mildly. Steve and Karen are currently filming a movie that they hope will revive their careers. The European director has suggested that they liven up an upcoming bedroom scene by actually having sex. The four are gathered at Karen’s luxurious home in the Hollywood hills the night before filming, allegedly to negotiate with their loved ones how far they are allowed to go in the shoot. However, it is more than an hour into the play before they finally get around to the matter at hand. The first hour is devoted to a series of arguments over such weighty questions as whether David Crosby is Bing’s son and whether Belgium is really part of Europe. By the time they get around to arguing over where tongues may or may not be placed during the shoot, we have realized that LaBute’s own tongue is planted firmly in his cheek. There are many amusing lines, but it all adds up to absolutely nothing. The actors give it their all. Weller, who was billed as Frederick in Mothers and Sons is listed here as Fred; I wish he had also shed the pinched voice that was so annoying in McNally’s play. Derek McLane’s set is lovely, Sarah J. Holden’s costumes are just right and Terry Kinney’s direction is fluid. Too bad they didn’t have something more substantive to work on. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes; no intermission.

This British import, now in previews in an MCC Theater production at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, marks two auspicious debuts — the American debut of up-and-coming English playwright Penelope Skinner and the stage debut of indie film actress Greta Gerwig. Both firsts are cause for celebration. Skinner’s play provides a fresh look at female libido, the confines of English country life and the uses and abuses of porn. Gerwig is superb as Becky, an English teacher, newly pregnant, starting the summer holiday with environmentally correct hubby John (the fine Jason Butler Harner) in their just-acquired country home. In a twist on convention, it is the pregnant wife who becomes sexually needy, while her baby-obsessed husband loses all interest in sex. Becky cannot tempt him even with favorites from their large collection of porn films. Skinner teases us with classic porn cliches — the plumber Mike (Max Baker) who arrives to fix Becky’s pipes and an eccentric neighbor Oliver (Scott Shepherd) who delivers the used bike Becky has purchased from him dressed as a highwayman in tight britches. Becky dreads the visits of Jenny (Cara Seymour), a well-meaning but desperately lonely neighbor whose husband is rarely around and who is bullied by her children. Becky’s bicycle gives her the freedom to pursue an affair that begins as a carefree exploration of porn-inspired fantasies but soon turns into obsession and desperation. We also meet Alice (Lucy Owen), Oliver’s wife, in a part so small that it could easily have been dispensed with. For me, the play did not provide a satisfactory resolution, but it kept me engrossed almost to the end. It could benefit from a slight trim. In a uniformly strong cast, the American actors handled their English accents with assurance. The cottage setting by Laura Jellinek was so thoroughly reconfigured during intermission that the stage crew got a round of applause. It may have been a technical triumph, but I thought it was an inelegant solution to the changes of location. Clint Ramos’ costumes were excellent. Ubiquitous director Sam Gold handles the material well. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including intermission. NOTE: In British slang, "village bike" means "local slut."