Category: "Off-Broadway"

Review: The Common Pursuit

© Joan Marcus

Sometimes, memories are best left alone. Such is my experience with seeing the new revival of Simon Gray’s The Common Pursuit being presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company. This high-toned soap opera about a group of Cambridge students involved in a literary magazine is unfortunately showing its age.

 

I remember having loved the original 1986 production at the now-gone Promenade Theater, but then again, its cast included such future stars as Dylan Baker, Nathan Lane and Peter Friedman. This current incarnation directed by Moises Kaufman features an ensemble of relative unknowns, some of whom may very well go on to have stellar careers. But there’s no such evidence for it here.

 

Taking place over a period of nearly twenty years, the play tracks the shifting professional and personal lives of such friends and colleagues as Stuart (Josh Cooke), who starts the journal that gives the play its title; his supportive girlfriend and eventual wife Marigold (Kristen Bush); rich kid Martin (Jacob Fishel), who bankrolls the enterprise and becomes the magazine’s publisher; the womanizing historian Peter (Kieran Campion); gay poet and scholar Humphrey (Tim McGeever), whose impossibly high standards eventually hinder his own career; and Nick (Lucas Near-Verbrugghe), an ambitious journalist and theater critic who sells out to television.

 

Although it contains plenty of the witty, erudite dialogue for which the author of such works as Butley and Otherwise Engaged was justly celebrated, the play feels schematic in its plotting and characterizations. The portrait of youthful idealism lapsing into cynical compromising by now feels all too familiar, and the series of dramatic revelations about adultery, suicide, and sudden reversals of fortune seem to arrive like clockwork.

 

The play’s lengthy first half feels particularly attenuated with its endlessly digressive dialogue. Things get a little punchier in Act II, but by then we’ve pretty much ceased to care about the windbag characters.

 

The young performers mostly seem adrift, delivering performances that smack more of caricature than characterization. In terms of both acting and staging, there’s simply nothing that sparkles, making this Pursuit less than fruitful.

 

Laura Pels Theatre, 111 W. 46th St. 212-719-1300. www.roundabouttheatre.org. Through July 29.

 

Review: Old Jews Telling Jokes

© Joan Marcus

It may not sound like much, but take my word for it. An elderly man reciting the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” in a Yiddish accent is one of the funniest things to be found on a New York stage.

 

It’s one of the many highlights of Old Jews Telling Jokes, the blunt title of which is only partially true. The five-person cast also includes two younger members who more than keep up with their elders.

 

This 80-minute joke-a-thon is the brainchild of Peter Gethers and Daniel Okrent, the latter of whom recently stepped down from his position as public editor of the New York Times. It’s based on a popular website, but you shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to kvell in person.

 

The concept couldn’t be simpler. Three seniors—Lenny Wolpe, Marilyn Sokol and the priceless Todd Sussman—tell a series of jokes, some hoary but all hilarious, about such topics as sex, marriage, old age and death. They’re ably supported by the comparatively junior Billy Army and Audrey Lynn Weston, as well as pianist Donald Corren who provides accompaniment for the occasional musical number.

 

The minimal staging includes animated projections and a hilarious film clip of Alan King delivering his classic “Survived by his wife” routine. But really, the jokes are the thing, and they come fast and furious. You may have heard some of them before, such as this chestnut: “Why do Jewish mothers drink? To dull the pain.” But even if you have, you’ll laugh anew.

 

It’s tempting to simply quote the funniest bits. But that would spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that the material, ranging from one-liners of the Henny Youngman variety to skits involving such things as a embarrassing public passing of gas and a man who falls in love with his sheep (uproariously impersonated by Sokol), is consistently uproarious.

 

The performers have their varied strengths. Wolpe provides a sly, avuncular gentleness; Sokol a vaudevillian physicality; Army a protean clowning; and Weston a deceptive sweetness that makes her sometimes obscene material that much funnier.

 

But the real MVP is the bespectacled Sussman, whose subtle delivery and masterful timing infuses every routine, including the aforementioned song recital, with comic brilliance.

 

Best of all, you don’t even have to be Jewish to enjoy the fun, although, as they say, it wouldn’t hurt.

 

Westside Theater, 407 W. 43rd St. 212-239-6200. www.Telecharge.com.

Review: Title and Deed

© Joan Marcus

Good luck searching for meaning in Title and Deed, Will Eno’s latest Rorschach test of a play being presented by the Signature Theatre. This monologue related by a nameless figure about his travels both literal and existential is so vague and amorphous that it remains elusive from beginning to end, which mercifully comes after only 70 minutes. It does, however, serve as an effective measure of the effectiveness of whatever stimulants you may be taking.

                  

“I’m not from here,” announces the nondescript man from an unspecified country. After presciently asking us not to walk out on him and if so to do it quietly, he proceeds to ramble on in shuffling, stammering fashion, resembling a stand-up comedian as conceived by Samuel Beckett.

 

And like so many stand-ups, he begins with an account of his encounter with airport customs, to which he declares that “I’m here to save us all.”

 

Not the audience, unfortunately, who are forced to glean whatever nuggets they can from the shambolic proceedings, which involve such matters as the deaths of the narrator’s parents and his friendship with a local family.

 

Eno gets off some good one-liners, some of the punning variety—the narrator describes love as “a many splintered thing”—and others of a vaguely philosophical nature. I do have to admit that I moved by one line towards the end of the play: “Don’t get too lost for too long,” the man advises. “They’ll stop looking, eventually.”

 

But it won’t be long before you simply settle into your seat for a nice quiet nap, aided by the non-existent staging of Judy Hegarty Lovett and the banal, deliberately matter-of-fact delivery by actor Conor Lovett (a veteran Beckett actor, by the way).

 

Eno, the author of such works as Thom Paine (based on nothing) and Middletown, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Horton Foote Prize winner whose work has been inexplicably championed in certain circles. This latest work, presented in a production by Ireland’s Gare St Lazare Players, will once again leave you wondering why.

 

The Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St. Through June 17. 212-244-7529. www.signaturetheatre.org. 

 

Review: Cock

© Joan Marcus

Get your mind out of the gutter.

 

Yes, the title of Mike Bartlett’s play might seem salacious considering that it concerns a gay couple whose relationship is threatened when one of them falls in love with a woman. But the more pertinent meaning of Cock is as in a cockfight, which this battle of wills among the three parties closely resembles.

 

The Olivier Award-winning drama currently receiving its New York premiere at the Duke on 42nd Street is staged in-the-round, with the audience sitting on wooden benches surrounding the action and a fluorescent light looming overhead.

 

One could argue that the presentation is gimmicky, that the play would work just as well in a traditional proscenium setting. But there’s no denying that James MacDonald’s staging adds a greater intensity to the already charged proceedings.

 

That the piece revolves around the central dilemma of the younger gay man forced to choose between lovers is reinforced by the fact that only he is identified by a proper name, John (Cory Michael Smith).

 

Competing for John’s affections are his longtime older lover M (Jason Butler Harner) and W (Amanda Quaid), the young woman with whom he has struck up a serious relationship. For a while he lurches back and forth between them until the trio face off at a tension-filled dinner party also attended by M’s supportive father (Cotter Smith), in which he given an ultimatum by both to finally make a choice.

 

John’s dithering, while certainly exasperating to his two lovers, is depicted in moving fashion. For him, it’s not simply a choice between two people but rather a determination of his sexual identity. For most of his life he has been solidly convinced he’s gay, but his love for W, which is as much physical as emotional, calls everything into question.

 

Despite their lack of specific names, both M and W are complexly drawn figures. M, a stockbroker who hides his insecurities beneath a barrage of withering quips, is despondent over the possible impending loss of his lover. And W, a divorced elementary school teacher, proves a formidable combatant, as steely and self-assured as she is vulnerable.

 

And M’s father, a macho type who has reluctantly come to accept his son’s lifestyle, eagerly throws himself into the fray with amusing results.

 

The dialogue is sharp-edged and funny, and the staging inventive. Particularly effective is a lengthy scene depicting John and W’s first sexual encounter, with the two figures expressing their ecstasy while merely facing each other and engaging in what looks like a two-step dance.

 

The performers deliver virtuosic performances that further help us identify with each of their characters. When John finally does make his agonized decision, he subsequently collapses into an emotional despair that is shattering to witness.

 

Despite the clinical nature of its setting, which resembles an operating room theater as much as a fighting ring, Cock proves both deeply moving and uproariously funny. Just be sure to bring along a well-padded seating cushion.

 

Duke on 42nd Street, 229 W. 42nd St. 646-223-3010. www.Dukeon42.org.   

 

Review: In Masks Outrageous and Austere

© Carol Rosegg

Tennessee Williams certainly doesn’t make it easy to be generous.

 

The common perception about the legendary playwright’s later works is that they were sad reflections of his former glory, but they have also been unfairly maligned by unfeeling critics expecting another Streetcar or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. But however generous one wants to be in assessing In Masks Outrageous and Austere, the playwright’s purportedly final work—he’s had more posthumous releases than Tupac Shakur—it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it’s an unholy mess.

 

It’s a beautifully staged unholy mess, though, as seen in this world premiere production directed by David Schweizer and starring Shirley Knight, whose half-century affiliation with the playwright goes back to the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth.  

 

Unfinished at Williams’ death in 1983, the play is set on a sundeck facing the ocean that is being guarded by three mysterious sunglass-wearing, sharp-suited operatives code-named “Gideon.” They are either protecting or holding captive “Babe” (Knight), an elderly heiress of a chemical company, as well as her much younger lover Billy (Robert Beitzel, looking and acting like Ashton Kutcher) and Billy’s “secretary”/lover Jerry (Sam Underwood).

 

Among the other bizarre characters wandering throughout the proceedings are Mrs. Gorse-Bracken, a middle-aged matron (Alison Fraser) who sings opera when she’s not meddling in Babe’s affairs; her mute, growling African-American husband (Jermaine Miles) and his dwarf interpreter (Jonathan Kim); and a chambermaid (Pamela Shaw) and her macho, garage-mechanic boyfriend (Christopher Halladay).

 

The desperate Babe periodically checks in by phone with her support system, played on video by Buck Henry and Austin Pendleton. Otherwise the surreal action is nearly incomprehensible, with such plot elements as the matron’s unseemly obsession with her young, mute son (Connor Buckley), who she calls “Playboy.”

 

“Latent incest on top of everything else?” rightly complains the aggrieved Babe. “My God, if this were theater, I’d think it a metaphor for the idiocy of existence.”

 

It is theater, and it probably is a metaphor, one of many awkward ones cluttering up this work that is sorely lacking the poetic language for which the playwright was renowned. Fans, however, will enjoy spotting the similarities and references, both overt and oblique, to such earlier works as The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.

 

Director Schweizer has delivered an elaborately glossy production, with the theater outfitted with wraparound video screens and transparent side booths in which the peripheral action takes place. But for all the care lavished on the staging, not to mention the fine performances by Knight and Fraser as the dueling grande dames, there’s no disguising the fact that this final work from one of our greatest playwrights is little more than an unfortunate, if at times admittedly fascinating, curiosity.

Culture Project, 45 Bleecker St. 866-811-4111. www.cultureproject.org. Through May 26.