A Comedy (of Sorts) Tonight

Lysistrata Jones at the Walter Kerr Theater

 

            Retellings of the old tales often work just because they aren’t yours.  With something that’s been proven to work—such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—you can mess around with the characters, storyline, and setting without worrying that you’re setting yourself up to fail (a fact of life Laurents, Bernstein, and Sondheim took advantage of with their hit West Side Story).  It’s almost a guarantee that you’ll attract viewers solely based on the following the old story has accrued.  That’s the same reason you can’t list many musicals on Broadway today that aren’t taken from a tale from long (or not so long) ago: think Billy Elliot, Mary Poppins, The Addams Family, War Horse, and especially Godspell.  This must be the reason why writing team Douglas Carter Beane (Sister Act) and Lewis Flinn (The Little Dog Laughed) thought they could succeed with their new musical Lysistrata Jones, based on Aristophanes’s age-old tale of women withholding sex as a means of controlling their disobedient men.  Sadly, they were mistaken.

            Lysistrata Jones is unspeakably average.  Every action performed on the stage screams maximum effort, minimum result.  While I do pity Beane and Flinn for coming close to what legitimately could have been a good show, I’m not inclined to accept something as mundane as this basketball farce.  It wasn’t that it was bad, but that it wasn’t the opposite either.  Jones is the kind of show where you leave the theater indecisive, because it hasn’t given you anything to be excited about.

            And there’s another fault.  Jones has no pull.  There’s no massive, noticeable feature like Daniel Radcliffe in How to Succeed or even a composer descending into a previously unvisited realm that has become newly interesting to the composer’s fans, as was the case with Stephen Schwartz and his passion project Wicked.  Even the concept of the show is wholly uninteresting.  Taking the pacifistic attitudes of the original Lysistrata’s women and reapplying their anger to a college basketball losing streak is forced and unrealistic.  If anything it makes the heroine seem utterly controlling, a puppeteer in the wings so desperate for glory she’ll instill a school-wide dry spell just to see some personal victory.  As if this wasn’t enough, “Lyssie J” installs herself immediately as cheerleading captain, a position that isn’t exactly home to many protagonists in fiction or non.  The result is that both Lyssie and the show are entirely unlikeable, and even song-ending high notes every now and again or an Aretha-like narrator with a toga and feather boa can bring the audience’s attention past the initial disinterest.

            A show’s greatest enemy is clichés, and Jones is chock-full of the kind of oversights that would make a playwright wince in his seat.  The dumb blonde who leads the pack away from conformation and into the light of self-acceptance (Legally Blonde, Clueless, House Bunny), the suave basketball captain whose belief in his solid relationship causes him all kinds of trouble (High School Musical, Pleasantville, Teen Wolf), and of course, the nerd-gets-the-girl theme that for some reason tends to hang out around feel-good comedies like a mosquito at your Fourth of July picnic (I hope I don’t have to name anything for this one).  There’s no shortage of original moments, either, but they’re far out-weighed by painful and grossly self-referential mentions of Siri, the iPhone, SparkNotes, and enough other odd little “techie” outbursts to make one wonder if Beane and Flinn wrote the show as a response to “those darn kids with their machines!”

            I won’t lie, there were one or two places where I laughed.  During a scene in the basketball locker room when the team, the vast majority of which is white, address each other as if at a meeting of the Crips, the team’s only African-American member complains, “Guys, I am the only black man here! Why are you talking this way?” But I didn’t love.  I didn’t feel the Broadway in the air (not surprising, since the show was produced originally in a gym and does its best to make the stage look like one too).  People pay hundreds of dollars to see a Broadway show, and if it’s not good enough, I’m going to tell you it’s not good enough.  And Lyssie and her team are not good enough for me.  Sorry, Lysistrata, but hopefully your writers will live to “Fight! Fight! Fight!” another day.

The Ego and the Id

Freud's Last Session at New World Stages

         Do I expect too much of New World Stages?

            To any experienced in the theater, the preceding sentence may seem odd and misinformed.  New World Stages has no standing on Broadway.  In fact, the seven-theater establishment is housed in what was once an underground movie theater.  But the Stages have good judgment, after picking up revivals of Rent and Avenue Q, or so it would seem.  But when I went to see the longest running show Off-Broadway this season, New World Stages disappointed me.  They put on a play that was long, inane, and monotonous.  The show was wildly rambling and had little point, describing a fictional meeting between C.S. Lewis (Mark H. Dold), the deeply theist author of The Chronicles of Narnia, and Sigmund Freud (Martin Rayner), the atheist psychologist who managed to link sex to innumerable everyday activities.  To call the play well-developed would be similar in nature to calling Elton John a real man’s man.  It makes no sense to me, and lacks any semblance of a plot.  Sure, the play was complicated, and there were moments where I could detect some things that were meant to be humor, but all in all I was nothing if not a man whose time had been wasted. 

Now, to be fair, there are only two people in the play, and one, Martin Rayner, who usually plays the part of Freud, was absent, leaving dual understudy Tuck Milligan in his place.  Milligan was a boring and unpracticed actor, and the performance seemed to mostly consist of Mark H. Dold attempting to coax Milligan into entering the fun and games of the play’s intensiveness, such as it was.  The actors themselves didn’t seem like they actually liked the work they were performing.  I agree.  The play had all the drama of a fifth grade report on Freud plagiarized from a few of his better books.  Perhaps if I had seen the play with Rayner in the title role, I would have felt differently.  For some reason, though, I don’t think so.

One can’t fault the playwright, Mark St. Germain, for running with an intriguing idea.  In 1939, Freud met with a young professor in his new home of England.  St. Germain was interested in the possibility that this professor could have been C.S. Lewis.  He imagined that “the meeting between these two men [would be] timeless.” The problem with Mr. St. Germain is that he gets so into the idea of religion that he makes the play seem like an amateur debate over the legitimacy of the Catholic Church.  Forgive me for expecting more of two of the most brilliant writers of the twentieth century, but I believe that if Lewis and Freud did meet (unlikely, since Freud was, at the time, in the midst of spiraling into a deep, solitary depression that would cause his purposeful morphine overdose) their conversation would be much more engaging and much more entertaining.  St. Germain wasn’t up for a premise this bold.  Perhaps in the future he should remain in the realm of bedroom farces or, better yet, one-man shows.  St. Germain’s droning rhetoric would be perfect for a graying man reclining in a director’s chair as the audience succumbs to slumber.

In another place, during a different, less enjoyable season, Session would have impressed me further.  It was just that in one of my more respected Off-Broadway theaters, I wanted more than what I was given.  I craved a show that gave Freud all he deserved, and Lewis all the literary self-references he could possibly spout.  If I could sum up the faults of this show in one sentence, it would be this—It wasn’t enough.  Good enough? Maybe.  Not substantive enough? That could be it.  But the key word is enough.  Theater should exceed expectations, astound you in a part of your sub-conscious where before you had only stored dreary reflection.  Freud’s Last Session did not give me that.  It stayed firmly in reality, something the arts are meant to transcend.  Sorry, New World Stages, but one dud ain’t bad.  Maybe next time.