Category Archives: The Play’s the Thing

Scarred inside and out

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Laura Linney plays a photojournalist who is home convalescing from injuries incurred from a roadside bomb while covering the war. The injuries include permanent scarring on her face, but that’s just the visible damage. The real stuff is under her skin.

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Eric Bogosian is her editor and friend who is suffering a midlife crisis. His girlfriend is a too chatty and much younger, but very likable, Alicia Silverstone.

All are excellent but the real firepower on stage is someone you’re probably not familiar with. Brian d’Arcy James is a tornado as Linney’s journalist boyfriend. Nurse H and I took in the excellent Time Stands Still by Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies at the Manhattan Theater Club. [A terrible, forgettable title, though.]

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James’ last appearance on Broadway was under cakes of make-up as Shrek in Shrek the Musical. I missed that but saw him in Conor McPherson’s Port Authority at the Atlantic Theater Company last year. Successfully navigating between these very different roles is not such an easy thing to do. And to hold his ground against Laura Linney isn’t a cakewalk, either.

I met my old lover on the street last night

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I went into the city for the first time since being commissioned for a freelance project in New Jersey over three weeks ago. I hadn’t been away from New York for that length of time since I was in my 20’s. Take it from me pallies, that was a long time ago.

I was worried that something might have changed. That suddenly, New York and I weren’t an item anymore. I was afraid of long, awkward silences and uncomfortable truths that might be revealed. Working close to home has its charms. It affords some important things that cannot be had when I work in the city. Sometimes, shiny toys lose their luster when you don’t play with them for a while. From a distance, you begin to wonder what you ever saw in them in the first place. Sometimes, you have a change of heart.

I timidly walked out of the subway at 50th Street and Broadway.

It was like seeing an old friend you’ve been worried sick about. Hello, 7th Avenue! Did you miss me! (Yes, she did.) My feet missed the sidewalks. My senses missed the disharmony. It was the first time I noticed how odd the mounted NYPD look strolling up an Avenue.

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I saw David Mamet’s Race. Full disclosure: I think Mamet is a great writer and am predisposed to liking his stuff before the house lights dim. I sat next to a black couple and I suppose the fact that I squirmed in my seat over the racial issues that were addressed is an indication of how expertly constructed the dramatic arc of the story was. And it was surprisingly funny. The entire cast is killer, especially James Spader.

race

Race is at the Barrymore, which was built in 1928 and has a rich past. At the same theater in 1992, I saw Jessica Lange struggle (and fail) to play Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire. She couldn’t keep up with Alec Baldwin’s Stanley Kowalski. He wiped the stage with her. In 1948, on the exact same floorboards, the play was premiered with Marlon Brando as Kowalski. I love history stuff like that.

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I walked into the subway to catch a downtown train. Someone was playing a trumpet. I threw $1 into his case. Subway stations have perfect acoustics for horn instruments. There’s just enough echo. He was so talented. A great musician. He played a rich, soulful rendition of Erroll Garner’s Misty and then a version of Johnny Mercer’s Laura that broke my stupid, stupid heart. And I felt at home again.

And you see Laura
On a train that is passing through.

“So, Romeo wanted to, like, bang Juliet”

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r+jInstead of just another tired-ass production of Romeo and Juliet, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma put a wicked spin on it. They randomly phoned people and asked them to recall the plot. The play is a series of verbatim monologues based on those phone calls. The results are hysterical.

Two masterful actors deliver the monologues in Elizabethan English and period costumes. Some of the respondents were surprisingly knowledgeable about the play but most delivered the same vague, uninformed story that I, myself, would have given if they had phoned me.

The last quarter of the play is given over to a dialogue examining the annoying neediness of young lovers and, worse, the unquenchable hunger for attention by actors who embrace Shakespearean roles. At the very end of the play, after heaping all that onto a funeral pyre, the lights go down and the two actors stand center stage and deliver a bit of Romeo and Juliet just as Shakespeare intended it. The beauty of the language and difficulty of the delivery is suddenly revealed.

Second helping

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underCB and I saw Theresa Rebeck’s very funny The Understudy at the Roundabout Theater. It’s a three-hander starring Julie White, a comedic actor who’s a pretty big deal in the theater community, and Justin Kirk, who stars with my pretend girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, in Showtime’s Weeds.

It’s the final week for this play, which opened in early November. I actually saw it back in October when it was still in previews but it was so good, and I had such a nice time, that I felt it was worth a second look.

Their performances were just as fresh as the first time. It amazes me how actors are able to do the same material night after night, month after month, and can still make the dialog seem spontaneous instead of scripted. The audience laughed just as hard the second time I saw it as they did the first. That can’t be accomplished with the script alone. It’s all in the delivery. The final fade-out was surprisingly touching.

* * *

This is my first play of 2010. I managed to see 29 plays in 2009 (yes, I keep a list) which is about 29 plays too many for most people. I get that. The theater has limited appeal but it got under my skin years ago when I moved to New York and I still find it to be an interesting night out.

We recently bought the soundtrack to the Broadway musical Wicked for 8-Year Old Daughter. It’s one of the most shrill, ear-piercing, annoying soundtracks I’ve ever had to suffer through. Each song comes to a deafening crescendo by one of the two leads. Mrs. Wife and I saw Wicked when it first opened and enjoyed it, but the soundtrack is proof positive that, unlike The Understudy, not everything on stage needs to be, or should be, revisited.

The Vibrator Play

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next+roomYes, it’s a play about vibrators. Sort of.

In The Next Room or The Vibrator Play is Sarah Ruhl’s hysterical new comedy. Its true-to-life premise is a subject that’s begging for closer study by Nursemyra.

In the 1880s, shortly after electricity was brought into homes, doctors had the bright idea to use a newly invented medical device, the vibrator, to treat women for their hysteria. I’m not kidding! This really happened! The treatment, causing an orgasm, was looked upon as a purely medical procedure that had nothing to do with sex.

Ms. Ruhl cleverly and believably imagines what it must have been like for the early pioneers of orgasm creation in repressed times. The good doctor’s wife listens by the door as treatment is applied and begins to wonder what those strange sounds are coming from the female patients in the next room. And why do the female patients steadfastly insist that they are not getting any better and need the treatment to continue?

Ms. Ruhl’s habit is to name her plays exactly what they’re about. I saw her last play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone (a woman picks up a dead man’s cell phone that’s ringing) that starred my pretend girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker. That one wasn’t nearly as satisfying as The Vibrator Play, but I was in the second row for Dead Man’s Cell Phone and almost jumped on stage to ask my Mary-Louise out for a drink.