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Shows Worth Seeing:
This
By Melissa James Gibson
Playwrights Horizons
416 W. 42nd St.
Box office: (212) 279-4200
This is the strongest and most
moving Gibson play to date. A smart, sharply observed look at
the response of four close-knit 30-somethings (a married couple
and two friends) to a crisis involving adultery, it is coolly
perceptive, deliciously realistic, drily witty, and anything but
trivial in the end despite its rather mundane central complication.
The married couple is bi-racial yet Gibson treats that as unremarkable
and relatively unimportant as a potential trouble source—the
birth of their baby, for instance, is far more of a threat because
it exhausts them both to the point where they can’t make
distinctions about what’s important. The friends are: a
young widow named Jane, wonderfully played with a brooding, steely
insouciance by Julianne Nicholson, and a depressed alcoholic gay
man named Alan cursed with perfect recall of conversation, played
with droll alacrity by Glenn Fitzgerald. The scene in which Alan
acts as a ruthlessly accurate referee during the married couple’s
climactic argument is the cleverest dramatic use of such a device
I can remember. Another splendid moment is a subtly gorgeous final
scene in which Jane quietly apologizes to her daughter for emotionally
neglecting her since her father’s death. The set designer
Louisa Thompson turns this into a brilliantly understated coup
de theater using nothing but a fragment of pink wall rising out
of the floor. This provides a less sketchy, more fully
conceived world than any of Gibson’s previous dramas, and
this newly realistic territory in some ways recalls that of Donald
Margulies's couple plays, such as Dinner with Friends.
The brittle grace of the dialogue, however, as well as the observations
about isolation and connection, are entirely Gibson’s own.
She strikes me as one of our brightest playwriting talents.
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Romeo and Juliet
By Nature Theater of Oklahoma
The Kitchen
512 W. 19th St.
Box office: (212) 255-5793
The Nature Theater of Oklahoma specializes in transforming the
utterly banal into the wackily theatrical. Last year they presented
the delightfully understated Rambo Solo, a work based
on a single actor’s astonishingly detailed, evening-length
recollection of an entire pulp novel. Their latest work is based
on recorded phone conversations with eight people asked to remember
the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet off
the top of their heads. These recollections are full of hilarious
inaccuracies, wild surmises and off-topic digressions. They are
also replete with the self-deprecatory qualifications, hesitations
and chatty colloquialisms one expects in casual chit-chat, and
that casualness notwithstanding, every word from them, including
filler items like “um,” is recited lovingly by two
self-consciously hammy actors as if it was precious, lofty poetry
from the profoundest classical drama. The point—and the
humor—of this absurdity evidently lies in the yawning gulf
between subject matter and packaging: in the incongruity between
the speakers’ and actors’ putative reverence for Romeo
and Juliet and their decidedly unelevated comments about
it. No doubt, somewhere beneath the silliness is a wry critique
of our illusions and conceits concerning classicism and high art
in the age of distraction and amnesia. Yet the piece isn’t
quite as satisfying as Rambo Solo, despite the warmth
and endearing aplomb of the performers Anne Gridley and Robert
M. Johanson. Its fragmented structure—the eight conversations
are strung together with only an occasional desultory dancing-chicken
gag between them—makes the ham acting feel redundant after
a while, and all the various chit-chat never really adds up to
the cumulative impression of dime-store brilliance one hopes for.
Still, I laughed about a dozen times over the 90 minutes deeper
and heartier than I have in a year of theater, and that’s
saying something. I have no idea what, but . . . something.
