Final Follies

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Primary Stages is celebrating its long association with the late A.R. Gurney with an evening of three of his one-act plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre. Each satirizes one of his favorite targets: the decline of WASPdom, suburban ennui and academic shenanigans. 

The first offering, the presciently titled “Final Follies,” was Gurney’s last work. In it, Nelson (Colin Hanlon; In Transit, Dot), a feckless WASP, applies for a job as a porn star rather than accept an allowance from his generous but controlling grandfather (Greg Mullavey; The Sisters Rosensweig, Clever Little Lies). Tanisha (Rachel Nicks; War, And I and Silence) is the attractive receptionist at the film studio’s office. Walter (Mark Junek; The Hairy Ape) is Nelson’s uptight brother, whose jealousy leads him to attempt to turn their grandfather against Nelson. The results are unexpected. It’s all quite amusing, if slight. 

The second play, “The Rape of Bunny Stuntz” from 1965, actually had its first production at the Cherry Lane. Bunny (Deborah Rush; Noises Off, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) is a buttoned-down suburban matron who is about to chair the meeting of some unidentified self-help group. Things get off to a bad start when she can’t find the key to the metal box containing everything she needs for the meeting. Her two minions Howie Hale (Piter Marek; Disgraced, Cyrano de Bergerac) and Wilma Trumbo (Betsy Aidem; All the Way, Nikolai and the Others) are of little help to her when the attendees retire to the cafeteria for refreshments until Bunny is ready to start the meeting. An unseen menacing figure in a leather jacket lurks offstage claiming he has her key. Bunny offers possible explanations that grow ever more self-incriminating. The play never really takes off and was by far the weakest of the three. The uncannily timely thing about the play is that Bunny talks about the detailed calendar she keeps to document her every activity. Sound familiar?

After intermission, we get “The Love Course” from 1969, the longest and strongest of the three. We meet Professors Burgess (Mr. Marek) and Carroway (Ms. Aidem) at the final session of the course they have jointly taught, “The Literature of Love.” It will not be offered again because she is moving to Mt. Holyoke after being turned down for tenure while he is moving up into administration. Sally (Ms. Hicks), one of Prof. Carroway’s favorite students, has brought her boyfriend Mike (Mr. Hanlon) along. The flamboyant Professor Carroway has boundary issues, confusing emotions on the page with those in the classroom. Her fury at Professor Burgess for perceived grievances boils over with hilarious results. There is not really much substance behind it all, but it’s very enjoyable.

The actors are all attuned to Gurney's sensibilities. David Saint (The Fourth Wall), a frequent collaborator of Gurney’s, directs with assurance. The minimalist set by James Youmans (The Fourth Wall) utilizes — some might say over-utilizes — concentric frames of colored light to frame the proscenium. David Murin’s (Steel Magnolias) costumes are spot-on. 

Two out of three isn’t bad. I think the evening would have been better without the second play, but it didn’t spoil things for me. Running time: two hours ten minutes including intermission.

War **

After enjoying all three plays I have seen by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (Appropriate, An Octoroon and Gloria), I arrived at LCT3’s Claire Tow Theater with high expectations. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Although I credit the playwright for his ambition and imagination, I did not feel that he had produced a coherent work. From reviews, I gather that the play has changed considerably since its 2014 Yale Rep premiere, Nevertheless it still did not seem like a finished product. The focus is divided among too many themes including sibling rivalry, family secrets, the scourge of dementia, dealing with parental illness, meeting parental expectations, racism in America and Germany from WWII to the present and man’s underlying simian nature. Particularly in the second act, there are too many long monologues that interrupt the flow. Roberta (the able Charlayne Woodard) is a well-to-do middle-aged African-American divorcee who has been rushed to a Washington hospital after suffering a stroke while visiting the ape house at the zoo. Her daughter Joanne (Rachel Nicks), a would-be children’s writer, is married to Malcolm (Reggie Gowland), a low key school teacher of no particular distinction, who is white. They have a young daughter. Joanne has only recently resumed a relationship with her mother after long years of estrangement. Her hostile brother Tate (Chris Myers), a political functionary working in Boston, flies in to be at his mother’s bedside and immediately lashes out at everyone including the kindly nurse (Lance Coadie Williams). We later learn that Tate and his male partner have recently split. Roberta was brought to the hospital by a mysterious woman who speaks almost no English; this is Elfriede (Michelle Shay), a German half-sister that Roberta has only recently discovered and, somewhat implausibly, never mentioned to anyone. Malcolm discovers a man staying at Roberta’s apartment, Elfriede’s angry son Tobias (Austin Durant), who is out to get a share of his late grandfather’s legacy. The nonstop shouting and bickering between Tate and everyone else grows quickly tiresome; Tate is so relentlessly nasty that I eventually cringed whenever he opened his mouth. The play’s most interesting feature is that for much of the first act we witness the comatose Roberta trying to regain her bearings with the assistance of a pack of gorillas led by Alpha (Williams again) whose language is projected as subtitles. It did not work for me. Simian imagery pervades the play from the monkey-sound taunts at Roberta’s father in Germany to the ape house at the zoo and the apes in her struggle for consciousness. Mimi Lien’s elegant scenic design is evocatively lit by Matt Frey. Montana Blanco’s costumes are apt. I can’t fault director Lileana Blain-Cruz for failing to bring all the disparate elements together better. While this evening was a disappointment, three hits out of four is still an enviable record for a playwright. Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes including intermission.

And I and Silence **

Naomi Wallace, a playwright in residence at Signature Theatre this season, has a most impressive resume. It includes a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, an Obie Award, the 2012 Horton Foote Prize and the 2013 Windham Campbell prize for drama. I wish I could say that the reasons for all her honors were more evident in her new drama now in previews at Signature. The action follows the story of two young women both as teenagers in prison in 1950 and as roommates nine years later. Scenes of their hardships in the outside world are juxtaposed with scenes of their budding friendship in prison. Many of the prison scenes involve Young Jamie (Trae Harris), who is black, coaching Young Dee (Emily Skeggs), who is white, how to be a proper servant, the career they look forward to pursuing after prison. Part of the lessons involve learning where to establish lines that must not be crossed in dealings with their future employers. After prison Jamie (Rachel Nicks) and Dee (Samantha Soule) are living in abject poverty, struggling to find and hold jobs as servants. The disconnect between their personalities in prison and later is exacerbated by the lack of physical resemblance between the two actors playing them. Skeggs’s body type is so different from Soule’s that it is a stretch to accept the two as the same character at different ages. The reasons for their desperation are not made sufficiently clear. The sudden explosion of repressed lesbianism took me by surprise. The actors invest their roles with sincerity and energy. The spartan set by Rachel Hauck is effective, as are Cliff Ramos’s costumes. With the audience split into two facing sides, director Caitlin McLeod needs to work harder to insure that fewer lines are lost when the actors are facing away. It all seemed like a mash-up of “Girls in Prison” and “Thelma and Louise” with a touch of “The Maids” thrown in. I hope that Wallace’s remaining two plays will deliver more evidence of her talents. In case you were wondering, the title is a line from an Emily Dickinson poem. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.