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.