Preview: "November"

Photo/David Hume Kennerly

[November opens on January 17th, 2007.]

While David Mamet and Nathan Lane may be as sharp as ever, the product of their respective wits, November, is an unyieldingly dull joke about stupid people in positions of high power. Except that their artistic creation, President Charles Smith, isn't stupid, at least not by current standards; he's just vulgar and crude, which is why his speechwriter, Clarice Bernstein (Laurie Metcalf) still comes to work in the morning. (That and the treat of being sent to bumfuck Bulgaria to be tortured; in Mamet's world, the president is an impotent bully.) It's also why he keeps a sycophantic lawyer, the quiet and corrective Archer Brown (Dylan Baker); the way his shit stinks, he knows he needs to cover his ass.

But beyond being a theatrical stand-in for our political frustrations, November refuses to talk turkey. That's all the more impressive considering that the main plot involves the president's attempts to extort a Representative of the Turkey By-Product Manufacturers (Ethan Phillips) into giving him the money he needs to build a Presidential Library when he is ousted from office in next week's election. But when a comedy doesn't have a point, all it can do is pour gas on an already riled audience, poking fun at "jibberism," the inanity of thinking "slavery" and "disco" are the two greatest wrongs in recent times, or simply pointing out the extremes of political corruption. It may be true that "there are no real solutions, there are only rearrangements of problems" (especially so in a comedy), but there's no problem in the play to rearrange: President equals Bad. End of story.

Mamet soldiers on anyway, his once frightening language now barely eliciting a giggle, and adds to the play with a series of phone calls designed to show off Nathan Lane's ability for the double-take. At least the regular scenes force Lane to play off his fellow actors, but for these monologues, Lane comes unhinged: he falls into the usual high-pitched squeals, the out-of-breath gasps of incredulity, the aghast moans, the blustering rage . . . I guess this is what some people are paying for, but Lane hardly needs Joe Mantello or David Mamet to do that, and November's biggest failing is that it becomes The Nathan Lane Show. It's also easy to generate laughs from a one-sided conversation; the other character never has to justify any of the implausible stuff they're saying, and the playwright, severing human connections, can play entirely for laughs, as with Chief Dwight Grackle (Michael Nichols). Sure, it's funny to hear Smith yell, "I hope your next wife is eaten by a walrus, too!" but when Grackle actually shows up, the shallowness of both the character and the play become painfully obvious.

The few bright spots of this play come from Mrs. Metcalf, who plays an idealistic left-wing lesbian with such giddiness that she floods the theater with spots of actual humanity. If there were a point to this play, her struggle to find the good in Smith's heart would be it, even if she inevitably falls back on the same extortive tricks to get what she wants: marriage, on national television. If there's anything the last eight years have taught us, it's how the world works -- or at least how stupid people think the world works, and therefore, the way the world works -- and Mamet's comic pontificating is just hot air. I won't say I didn't laugh at November -- I believe the count was three chuckles? -- but that just makes it President Smith's favorite thing: happy horseshit.

PLAY: "The Santaland Diaries"

Photo/Jennifer Maufrais Kelly

David Sedaris, if you've ever read him in The New Yorker or heard him on NPR, is an icy humorist. He comes across as droll, listless, and bitter, which makes him perfect for the cold commercial holidays. But his slow, nuanced book, The Santaland Diaries isn't done much justice by Joe Mantello's adaptation, which, in forcing big-bellied Santa laughs with a series of jolly cuts that jump from joke to joke, loses the sardonic rhythm that sustains all of Sedaris's work.

B. Brian Argotsinger is missing something, too: he seems uncomfortable emulating Sedaris's sedate nerviness, but quite at home in Michael Wilson Morgan's candy-cane stockings, which constantly belies his own derision. Instead, he resembles the "artistic" elf he talks about, codenamed Flaky: he comes across more as an actor who hates his job so much that he'll turn it into something more agreeable, in this case, a chance to mimic his targets. Whereas Sedaris just calmly rolls everything into one casually caustic joke, Argotsinger leaps into the voices of those bad elves, Santas, and parents, which is pandering more to the audience than to the tenor of the text. (In fact, he commands the stage like a stand-up comedian, waiting for laughs and -- at one point -- talking directly to one person as he cracks a smile and says, "Oh, now you get it!")

That much isn't really Argotsinger's fault: he's not reciting the book, he's doing Mantello's overbearing play, and as such, his twinkling eyes are a good match for his perpetual sneer and slump. He's also not being helped by Jason Podplesky's perplexing direction, which often strands Argotsinger between lighting cues, forcing him to scramble across a set of hastily gift-wrapped boxes in order to hit his next mark. Sedaris is about as far from farce as you can get, and forcing his words into that sort of festive atmosphere corrodes the underlying ideas.

Thankfully, when the text is left alone, it continues to stand the test, and Argotsinger has a nice deadpan (when he actually uses it). Hearing a "serious" account of working as a Macy's holiday elf can't not be funny, especially when it's punctuated with pleasant anecdotes about the child who wishes for his dead father to come back . . . and for a set of the Ninja Turtles, or the trainee who wants to know if she can work as a full-time elf, year round. These accounts are funny on their own merit, but when they're accented, emphasized, or shouted, they lose their composure.

The Gallery Players has lately shown a commitment to showcasing works that haven't been around for a while (Six Degrees of Separation), or most recently, with brand-new musical productions (Yank!), but this staging of The Santaland Diaries seems as cool and commercial as Santaland's own mechanical efficiency. This production solemnly shuffles from (admittedly) good joke to good joke, but it's no surprise that it took a full thirty seconds for the audience to clap at the end -- we were all left waiting for so much more.

PLAY: "Blackbird"

Although Blackbird is an ambiguous title, the playwright's name--David Harrower--manages to perfectly pronounce the tone of the piece. Like other famous Davids (Mamet comes to mind), he has created a terse, harrowing, 90-minute showdown between an office manager and the 27-year-old girl he had "illegal relations" with when she was twelve. Not going the easy route, he makes Ray (Jeff Daniels) the victim. The moment we meet him, he stands in a self-defeated slouch; when he speaks, it is with a choking sound, as if his mouth were clenched into a fist. Meanwhile, Una (Alison Pill), is the cat-like tormentor, languorously mocking Ray from a plastic chair, curling and uncurling both her body and her accusations in sudden rushes of text. She plays him like a ball of string, batting him around with the truth and staring him down with piercing, innocent eyes--like those of a child--and an adult, almost Cheshire-like grin.

Harrower's script gives them both ample opportunity to play. Una isn't really there for closure, and Ray's conception of pedophilia defies expectations: "I was never one of them," he claims. There's a bleak humor in realizing that Ray means it: he admits that his trial would have gone better if he had been abused as a child, and that if he had managed to return to her bedside, he would have looked even guiltier (he flight at least makes it seem as if he recognized his guilt).
As my theatergoing friend pointed out, this is akin to the justifications (and tone) of Martin in Edward Albee's The Goat. But whereas Albee was writing a satirical tragedy with heavy doses of melodrama to lighten the blows, Harrower is more interested in the uncomfortably bleak question of whether or not love can ever be wrong.

Jeff Daniels and Alison Pill are both extremely talented performers her, and their nuances are what make that question so hard to answer. Una acts a little neurotic, but if she really is traumatized, then perhaps love is a trauma. Ray, although at first angrily dismissive, is a man still on the edge, simply trying to protect what little dignity he's been left with after prison. The two are fragile, and the play's strongest, most settling moment, is a post-coital remembrance:

"Did I cum?" she asks, with the subtext of lingering trauma. Him, in ragged response: "I thought you did. Yes." "How could you tell?" she says, so much like a child that it's painful. "Your face was flushed. You kept your eyes shut a long time."

The sentences are short and natural, as is the style of the entire play. While it's easier to believe she was a shameless girl with a crush, stupid enough to start, and that he was a lonely man too stupid to stop her, Harrower takes a more critical approach. When Ray says, "You weren't like other children.... You knew more about love than I did, than she did," we believe him. Harrower also manages to conflate two issues: after Una is found, the detectives all but rape her (cleaning her out) to get their evidence: "They asked me what you'd done to me and then told me what you'd done to me when I wouldn't." It's not an easy (or pretty) task, but it's staggeringly effective.

The only place where Blackbird has its dark wings clipped is in Joe Mantello's lighting choice. After going through so much effort to construct a realistic office on stage (kudos to Scott Pask), and then to focus the action within a single, prison-like conference room, it doesn't make sense to change the natural direction for the two lengthy monologues each character gets. Granted, it isn't easy to find things for the other character to do while they're being lectured, but that's the director's job. The harsh, soft lights of the office (Paul Gallo's design) are enough: the theatrics of dimming them comes across as cheap and distracting.

Blackbird is a show well-worth seeing, capable of casting some doubts on what is otherwise a morally unambiguous issue. For all that the dialogue is naturally awkward, full of false starts and stops, it's at the same time technically crisp and precise, rehearsed just enough to feel fresh and not at all sloppy. Whether or not you agree with Harrower's stark appraisal of love, Blackbird is an important piece for Manhattan Theater Club, no Doubt about it.