Hometown Boy

Hold On to Me Darling at the Atlantic Theater Company

(L-R: Timothy Olyphant and C.J. Wilson in Hold On To Me Darling.)

As if we needed further reminder, there is ample evidence at the Atlantic Theater Company through April 3rd that the theater community ought to be eternally grateful -- indeed, ought to be nearly continuously genuflecting -- for the continued presence of Kenneth Lonergan, the greatest American playwright to emerge onto the scene in the last 25 years, in its midst.  Hold On To Me Darling, part treatise on celebrity and part paean to humanity, is slow to start but engrossing and entertaining for nearly all of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, a feat unmatched by many a Broadway production of late.  Mr. Lonergan, who wrote This is Our Youth and co-wrote the screenplay to Gangs of New York, is one of the last dramatic writers working who is a true master structuralist (Nora Ephron was one, Billy Wilder another -- where have they all gone?).  The twists and turns of his narrative are deployed with such a dexterous hand that they’re nearly as fascinating as the narrative itself.  Hold On To Me Darling bears the marks of a play that, like Youth (revived in 2014), will live on beyond any initial run.

Not that this one, directed by Atlantic artistic director Neil Pepe, is anything to sneeze at.  Timothy Olyphant more than bears the weight of a deeply difficult main character, Strings McCrane, a world-famous country singer and movie star -- his brother, Duke (C.J. Wilson, gruff and excellent) calls him “the third-biggest crossover artist of all time,” not without resentment.  The sudden death of Strings’ mother, at sixty-seven, just as he is about to begin shooting a big-budget epic and launching a worldwide tour, shatters and transforms him.  Suddenly he is desperate to escape the burdens of a star’s life, and in a flash he’s proposing to a married massage therapist, Nancy (Jenn Lyon, mastering and shading an ambitious gold digger), planning to move back home to Tennessee, and buying and managing a feed store in his hometown -- where his young, recently widowed second cousin (Adelaide Clemens, phenomenal) causes problems in his young relationship.  When confronted with his own obliviousness and self-contradiction, Strings maintains that his crusade is a holy one -- to live a simple life, leaving the paparazzi, the crowds, and his $200 million definitively behind.  

If it sounds simplistic, a southern-fried rom-com slightly northward of Sweet Home Alabama, it never is.  Admittedly, its particular charm takes a few scenes to fully rub you the right way, but once it does, it quickly coalesces into a fully memorable if slightly cliched piece of modern American drama.  Mr. Lonergan has always been at home with stories of young, wealthy, confusingly likeable jerks returning home after a tragedy, and this go-around is no exception.  Every scene, every line, every word is shaded with meaning (not to mention the jokes that land hard), with the added benefit of a collection of pitch-perfect southern accents that add legitimacy to a deeply authentic Tennesseean story written by a Bronx native.  (Props to Stephen Gabis, the dialect director.)  Walt Spangler’s rotating scenic design contains more hallways and rooms than seem possible for a structure so small.  Similarly, this play initially plays into expectations only in order to subvert and deepen them.  And if the hard-edged celebrity satire softens into reflective familial schmaltz at the end, you can't really begrudge Mr. Lonergan his indulgence, since, like the country singers Strings emulates, he's just too damn good at it.

Masters of the Universe

Dry Powder at the Public Theater

(L-R): Claire Danes, John Krasinski, and Hank Azaria in Dry Powder.

    Not since Glengarry Glen Ross has such as collection of eloquent slime been assembled upon a stage as in Dry Powder, the new play by Sarah Burgess and directed by Tommy Kail at the Public through May 1st.  Like that play, it’s appealing not for its sporadic cruel humor or for its pathos as much as its effortless fluency in the language of the profession it variously celebrates and views through a skeptical eye.  In the case of David Mamet’s 1984 play, it was real estate sales; for Ms. Burgess, it’s private equity.
    The latter playwright achieves a similar feat to the former in making the obscure language of a demonized line of work seem poetic and clear without ever oversimplifying it.  Ms. Burgess, like Mr. Mamet, also raises the stakes beyond the everyday, making immediate the struggles of a class of people with whom the theatergoing public might struggle to identify.  Rick, an impatient collection of tics and bellows played excellently by the wonderful character actor Hank Azaria, is the founder and president of a beleaguered private equity firm called KMM, which has run into trouble as of late after Rick threw himself an elaborate birthday party (which he insists included no more than one elephant) on the same day as KMM laid off thousands of workers at a national supermarket chain they own.  The resulting PR nightmare -- which seems to be brewing financial trouble for Rick as well -- can only be abated by a huge deal.  Luckily, Seth (John Krasinski), a co-founder of the firm and one of Rick’s right-hand men, has one: the acquisition of an American-made luggage company run by a seemingly gullible CEO, Jeff (Sanjit de Silva).  Jeff is willing to sell for a song, but the third co-founder, Jenny (Claire Danes), refuses to consider any deal, however good it’d look, that doesn't maximize potential profit.  Betrayal and backroom deals ensue.
    The cast is excellent and thrillingly naturalistic, but, appropriately for a play about high finance, the day is stolen by an unexpected participant.  Claire Danes’ character is a cartoon -- she refers to Yale as a “second-tier Ivy” and appears genuinely dumbstruck when Jeff tells her about his company-wide volunteering initiative -- and she’s not the right actress, overrated as she is, to elevate her to anything more than a generally funny foil.  It’s John Krasinski, unsurprisingly for me but perhaps surprisingly to the general public, who walks away with the production.  He has a towering dignity as an actor that he could never quite hide under his mean-spirited prankster on “The Office,” and he handles Seth’s transformation from smarmy sleaze to the moral center of the play, one of the most satisfying arcs in recent drama, with the same reserved, relaxed aplomb with which he fires off insults at his rival, Jenny.  It’s his first Off-Broadway performance, but almost certainly not his last.
    The play itself -- staged in the round by Mr. Kail, director of Hamilton, in a sea of nonspecific blue plastic fitting for a play about removed industrialism -- is not so much ripped from the headlines as much as it makes the audience vaguely uncomfortable when referencing subjects that are becoming more and more relevant (carried interest comes to mind).  The bespoke suits and unfortunate pantsuits (designed by Clint Ramos) and pulsing electronic music (by Lindsay Jones) seem to suggest that not all that much has changed in this world since the days of the yuppie, amoral businessmen who inspired American Psycho.  And much as those amoral businessmen would, it actually succeeds in raising the suspicion that doing what’s “right” may not always be the best choice, not only financially but also morally.  This means Ms. Burgess, in her third play, has created something ethically ambiguous, laugh-out-loud funny, and disturbingly relevant -- words one could easily use to describe the looming presence of the very system it depicts.

Secret Identities

The Crucible at the Walter Kerr and She Loves Me at Studio 54.

(L-R): Zachary Levi, Byron Jennings and Jane Krakowski in She Loves Me.

    I don’t entirely know how to describe the experience of a production directed by Ivo van Hove except to say that I seem to have been living in one since December, when I saw his acclaimed reinterpretation of A View From the Bridge.  I have just come from The Crucible (at the Kerr through July 17th), the other of Arthur Miller’s two most visceral plays, also directed by Mr. van Hove and designed by his partner Jan Versweyveld, and the four-month gap between has folded to something thinner than a memory, until the two spread together across theatrical time and space to form one blood-drenched morality play of the human condition.  I don’t know if this is enough to call Mr. van Hove the best director of straight plays active in the American theater, but I will say that if he should decide to conclude this American trilogy with a revival of Abie’s Irish Rose I should probably have to hold my nose and buy a ticket.
    To begin with, it is astonishingly well-acted by an extraordinary cast.  Saorise Ronan, late of Brooklyn, in her stage debut, acquits herself well as the dead-eyed girl who accuses her former lover’s wife of witchcraft in 17th-century Massachusetts, as does Tavi Gevinson as the accuser’s friend who grows disillusioned with pointing fingers.  (I’m thrilled that a participant in the hugely underrated 2014 revival of This is Our Youth has been thus recognized.)  But Ben Whishaw and Sophia Okonedo, as the Proctors, the skeptical couple who find themselves at the mercy of mob hysteria, steal the production, turning in sensitive, understated performances full of love, tenderness, and authenticity.  Where Mark Strong, in A View From the Bridge, bellowed and growled in fear of loss of his world, Okonedo and Whishaw stand proudly and finally bow humbly.  Tonally, this poses no threat of whiplash to Mr. van Hove, further proof of his maneuverability in the American canon.
    Part of the production’s success -- equal to, but not quite exceeding, that of A View from the Bridge -- is that The Crucible remains such a gripping and a relevant play.  Wisely, Mr. Versweyveld and Wojciech Dziedzic, the costume designer, have kept the visual details of the play out of the realm of temporal definition, so as to leave the events of the Salem witch-hunt it describes unmoored to any age -- a detail of which Mr. Miller would undoubtedly approve, given that his play, written in 1953, was meant to mirror the Communist witch-hunt of the McCarthy hearings.  At first Mr. van Hove’s staging seems too small for the vast proscenium of the Walter Kerr, but as the show goes on we begin to see that he is treating figures like a slowly growing whirlwind, scattered and slow-moving at first, then faster and faster, whirling until the audience is forcibly drawn forward as a participant -- and a witness.

    It’s become just as easy to recognize a Scott Ellis production as it is to recognize a van Hove one.  Like Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis is a master of a his craft as a director, has a magnificent touch with actors, works exclusively with one scenic designer (David Rockwell, one of the best in the business), and harbors a deep love for the American stage canon.  Unlike Mr. van Hove, Mr. Ellis has a facility, one of the most dependable on Broadway, for leaving the audience with an ear-to-ear smile that lasts for days and days afterward.  After back-to-back knockouts with On the Twentieth Century and You Can't Take It With You and a relationship with Broadway hits going back to the eighties, it’s become his trademark.
    So, for the 50th anniversary season of the Roundabout Theater Company (with whom Mr. Ellis has a long history -- he directed both of their first two Broadway musical revivals), it’s back to She Loves Me, Mr. Ellis’ first-ever production with the Roundabout back in 1993.  Once again he directs and Mr. Rockwell designs, and Laura Benanti and Zachary Levi star as the dueling lovers in an adaptation of the same play that served as the inspiration for The Shop Around the Corner and You’ve Got Mail.  Joe Masteroff, of Cabaret, wrote the deeply excellent book, borrowing just enough both from that play, Parfumerie, and from Samson Raphaelson’s script for Shop whole still having fun with it in a fashion uniquely his.  It’s objectively a better book than Cabaret’s, and certainly a wittier one.
    Meanwhile, Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, who went on to write music and lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof a year after this musical, in 1963, used this little jewel-box certainty of an adaptation to do some of their most playfully experimental work.  Bock’s music is just as sweet as it is fleet, and Harnick’s lyrics are so darting, quick, and satisfying they recall a puzzle of which you can't stop following the contours.  (“Sounds While Selling” makes “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” look like “I’m a Little Teapot.”)  There are twenty-two numbers in the show, and one can’t repress the feeling that Bock and Harnick just had a hell of a lot of fun writing this show and got carried away.  Who wouldn’t?
    Because this is an absolutely delightful musical revived in an absolutely delightful production with a radiant ensemble (Michael McGrath, Nicholas Barasch, Jane Krakowski, and Gavin Creel are standouts), an irresistible sense of fun, and two perfect leads.  Ms. Benanti, whose voice alone should be billed above the rest of the cast, had a cold on the performance I saw her, not that you would know it for the bravura performance she turned in.  The only thing that could match her singing voice is her funny, sympathetic, flawless stage presence.  A lesser actor would've quailed in her presence.  Instead, shockingly, the normally unremarkable Zachary Levi (late of NBC’s “Chuck”) more than matches her with the felicity of any rom-com leading man and energy that puts those leading men to shame.  (When Mr. Levi, six-three, pulled off a perfect cartwheel during the title number, I was barely surprised.)  I kept thinking he was doing an impression of some old matinee idol from the forties before I realized it was only that he was turning in a performance that would not seem out of place there -- the first I've seen in a while.  If I loved this trademark Ellis production absolutely to death, if I would readily see it again several hundred more times, it’s for the same reason anyone still watches old romantic comedies -- the boy and the girl helped me fall in love with an old, dear friend all over again.

Remembrance of Things Past

Blackbird, at the Belasco Theatre

Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams in a promotional still from Blackbird.

Blackbird, by David Harrower, opens at the Belasco, in its Broadway premiere, on March 10^th, and true to the playwright’s name, it manages to be harrowing without entirely achieving the similarly difficult feat of being meaningful.  It originated at the 2005 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, then transferred to the West End, where it won the 2007 Olivier Award for Best Play.  That same year it came to the Manhattan Theatre Club, with Jeff Daniels and Allison Pill in its two primary roles and directed by Joe Mantello.  In the eight years since it’s had over forty productions around the world, and a film version, starring Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn, is due later this year.  So most of the team from that MTC production (minus Ms. Pill, who’s gotten an ABC drama since) has been reassembled for this production.

Mr. Mantello, who’s also responsible for this season’s The Humans, a painful play about a reunion between once-close compatriots who hurt and keep things from one another, is dealt a similar hand here.  Ray (Mr. Daniels), a possibly reformed pedophile who has started a new life under the name Peter, is visited at his workplace by Una (Michelle Williams, replacing Ms. Pill), his victim (although it becomes a matter of perspective whether this is the right word).  It’s been fifteen years since they’ve seen each other; their relationship occurred when she was twelve and he was forty.  Una never left her hometown and has suffered disgrace and humiliation, whereas Ray, after serving less than three years in prison, has, as Una sees it, gotten off scot-free.  She wants resolution, and confronts her abuser in his office’s garbage-scattered breakroom, as “Peter’s” coworkers slide by behind fogged windows like sharks circling for the attack.

Blackbird has power, undoubtedly, but it’s largely due to its performances, and those are interesting more in terms of actorly vivacity than dramatic talent.  Mr. Daniels makes Ray altogether too sympathetic, which may seem an unfair criticism given that the challenge with a character like Ray is to make him sympathetic in the first place, but it must be said that Mr. Harrower’s writing and Mr. Daniels’ performance never altogether plumb the depths of this man’s psyche.  He seems more neurotic than ashamed, but too uncomfortable with the situation to truly be unaffected by Una’s presence. 

Ms. Williams, meanwhile, in her second Broadway appearance, does nearly the same thing with Una as she did with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two years ago.  She delivers a twitchy, spasmodic performance ripe with tics that would commonly be described as overacting, but so unique in their enactment it’s almost impossible to come down on one side or the other as to whether it’s any good.  Her Bowles was nearly un-criticize-able because no one was really sure what she was doing; I felt much the same way about her Una.  When she’s not girded by superior material, however, it’s more difficult to give her the benefit of the doubt; when I recall Carey Mulligan’s performance in Skylight last year, as another spurned woman confronted with her much older and crueler former lover, I think of stillness and strength despite an unraveling personal life.  Onstage, Ms. Mulligan was a beacon, while Ms. Williams is a flickering, uncontrolled bug zapper.

Eventually, the play’s tenuous grasp on morality and motivation comes to seem confusing rather than fascinatingly disconcerting; Una’s transition from fury to a kind of an Oedipal desire is too abrupt to be convincing, and subtext alone makes not a dramatic tour-de-force.  All in all, the show rather parallels Scott Pask’s interesting set, which begins as a dreary, fluorescent-lit office hallway and literally unfolds into the conference room like a pop-up book.  The process of initiation draws you in, but gradually you’re left with something you’ve seen before.  To harrow is not to entertain.