Six Degrees of Separation

B-

It isn’t often these days that you see a straight play with 18 actors on Broadway, so I salute the producers for bringing us this expensive revival. John Guare’s popular 1990 send-up of limousine liberals is based on a true story about a young man (the excellent Corey Hawkins) who passes himself off as Paul Poitier, son of actor Sidney, to worm his way into the homes of several wealthy East Side couples who should know better.The story is told by one such couple, art dealer Flan Kittredge (a surprisingly underwhelming John Benjamin Hickey) and his wife Ouisa (Allison Janney, competent but no match for my memories of Stockard Channing),. “Paul” is well dressed, charming and articulate, knows details about their children at Harvard, and  dangles the promise of casting them in the film Cats that his father is coming to New York to direct. They let him stay overnight. When Ouisa goes to wake him the next morning, he is in bed with a hustler (James Cusati-Moyer). During the long scene in which his hosts chase him around the apartment, the naked hustler has ample time to demonstrate that he has all the requisites for a successful career. Later the Kittredges learn that their friends Kitty (Lisa Emery) and Larkin (Michael Countryman) had their own encounter with “Paul” the previous night. We eventually meet their horrid children (Colby Minifie, Keenan Jolliff and Ned Riseley) who are portrayed as cartoon characters. Chris Perfetti fares better as Trent, the young man who has inadvertently set the events in motion. My biggest complaint about the play is the episode in which “Paul” cons two young would-be actors from Utah (Peter Mark Kendall and Sarah Mezzanotte) with tragic results. It is an abrupt shift from the satire of the rest of the play. I found director Trip Cullman’s approach to the play generally too broad. Mark Wendland’s set is very red and very tall. Clint Ramos’s costumes are fine. The play aspires to deeper meanings that it never reaches. Running time: one hour 40 minutes, no intermission.

Long Day’s Journey into Night **

When a Pulitzer and Tony winning play regarded by many as a masterpiece is revived with a stellar cast, it is cause for keen anticipation. And so I was eagerly awaiting Roundabout Theatre’s revival of Eugene O’Neill’s semi-autobiographical play starring Jessica Lange, Gabriel Byrne, Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr. as the members of the Tyrone family. O’Neill forbade publication until 25 years after his death, but his widow overrode his wishes and published the play in 1956, only three years after he died. James Tyrone (Byrne) is a miserly 65-year-old actor who sold out by repeating the same lucrative role for too many years. James Jr. (Shannon) is the 33-year-old elder son, a ne’er-do-well who has managed to have a third-rate acting career trading on his father’s name. Edmund (Gallagher), ten years younger, has always been frail and sickly. A would-be writer, he is O’Neill’s stand-in. All three Tyrone men are devoted to the bottle. Finally there is wife and mother Mary (Lange), a faded beauty who became addicted to morphine after Edmund’s birth and has just returned from yet another sanitorium stay. Over four acts stretching from morning to midnight on a day in August 1912, we watch this ultimate dysfunctional family lacerate themselves and each other, expressing affection, hatred, exasperation, blame, sympathy and denial. Brevity and subtlety are not among O’Neill’s strengths. While I remember being tremendously moved by the 1962 film version with Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell, today I found myself restless and impatient. When intermission arrived at the 1 1/2 hour mark, I realized with dread that there were still two hours to go afterwards. The fourth and final act seemed endless. I have been trying to figure out why it didn’t work for me this time. The first problem for me was that Shannon is so much bigger than Byrne that he literally and figuratively overshadows him. In a restrained performance, Byrne is not convincing as a former matinee idol. Lange’s Mary, on the other hand, is much too theatrical for my taste. Shannon has so much presence that he dominates any scene he is in. Gallagher’s Edmund is adequate but unmemorable. Colby Minifie is fine as Cathleen, the maid. The effective set design by Tom Pye features a low ceiling that ominously hangs over the family. Jane Greenwood’s costumes are fine, especially Mary’s dresses in pale colors that suggest her fading away. Jonathan Kent’s direction does not produce a unity of approach from the actors. If you have never seen the play and have the patience to sit for almost four hours, see it. If you have fond memories of an earlier production, treasure them and sit this one out. Running time: 3 hours 45 minutes including intermission.

Summer Shorts: Series B *

The second installment of the Summer Shorts Festival of New American Short Plays at 59E59 Theater features works by Lucy Thurber (The Hill Town Plays), Robert O’Hara (Bootycandy) and Stella Fawn Ragsdale.

In Thurber’s Unstuck we meet Pete (Alfredo Narciso), a man too depressed to leave the house even on his birthday. In three scenes he interacts with his sister Jackie (Lauren Blumenfeld) who badgers him to critique her hilariously inept tap-dance routine, his narcissistic friend Sara (Carmen Zilles), who offers him a birthday cupcake and a song and, finally, his patient live-in girlfriend Deirdre (KK Moggie), who tries to snap him out of his depression. Unfortunately Pete’s lethargy was contagious and, for me, more than cancelled out the liveliness of the three women. Laura Savia directed.

O’Hara’s Built has an interesting premise. Mrs. Back (Merritt Janson), a disgraced former teacher has a rendezvous with Mason (Justin Bernegger), a studly 25-year-old with whom she had sex at school 10 years ago. Their encounter is more than a little kinky. The brief male nudity suggests why she found him so irresistible. Their perspectives on their earlier relationship differ. Unfortunately, the play ends with a twist that comes out of nowhere and makes very little sense. Bernegger certainly gives it his all. Who was it who said that there’s nothing wrong with being an exhibitionist as long as you put on a good show? The playwright directed.

Ragsdale’s Love Letters to a Dictator gets off to a bad start and never recovers. Stella (Colby Minifie, recently in Punk Rock), a farm woman with the same name as the playwright enters with a large laundry basket under her arm. Instead of setting the basket down and sitting, she balances on one foot struggling to take her boots off while still holding the basket. Nothing that follows makes much sense either. Stella has left her family behind in Tennessee to move to New York to be a writer. It is also mentioned that she left to avoid ostracism over the wrong kind of love. Unable to adjust to city life, she moves to a farm in the Hudson Valley. Out of the blue she begins corresponding with the North Korean dictator and seeks his advice over whether to return home. She hangs her correspondence from clothespins on a line that stretches across the stage. When Kim Jong-Il dies, she writes a final letter. That’s about it. Logan Vaughn directed.

While the actors in all three plays were commendable, the material did not rise very far above the level of exercises for a playwriting workshop. The sets and costumes were by the same people who designed Series A. Running time: 75 minutes, no intermission. It seemed longer.

Punk Rock *

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).