THEATER: Mrs. Warren's Profession

One of the safest, most boring revivals ever, Doug Hughes's stab at Mrs. Warren's Profession (or should I say "stabbing of") makes a better argument for director's theater than anything Ivo von Hove has ever done. After all, whether or not you liked Hove's version of The Little Foxes, at least you'd feel something, which is far from true about Hughes's production. With shows like this on its schedule--Pygmalion wasn't much better--it's no wonder that Roundabout aims for star-studded casts--how else to foist something so unimaginative on Broadway than to use Cherry Jones as bait? It hardly serves even an educational purpose, especially since the sight-lines--especially from house-right--and the struggling accents mask so much of George Bernard Shaw's writing, leaving behind only the shrill cries of the most melodramatic of moments.

Sally Hawkins and Cherry Jones do make a fairly good team as the young, studious Vivie Warren and her loose--literally--mother, Kitty, and their reconciliation in Act II serves as a nice counterweight for their big throw-down in Act IV. There's some nice mugging from Mark Harelik, too, who plays Sir George Crofts, Kitty's unscrupulous business partner. But these stand out only against the blandness of Mr. Praed (Edward Hibbert) and Reverend Samuel Gardner (Michael Siberry), personifications of dead air, and the cardboard motives of pretty much everyone in the play, especially Frank Gardner, who is wooing Vivie for her money--something all too obvious from the lack of chemistry, emotion, or anything resembling craft exuding from Adam Driver (who was equally terrible a few years back in The Retributionists).

Nor is Mrs. Warren's Profession a play that can handle slight measures--like Scott Pask's awfully cheap-looking exteriors and optically unnerving interiors. It has not aged well, not simply on account of the lethargic pace, but because the subject material--disapproving daughter discovers her mother is an international madame--is so morally dated. At least Gypsy threw in some pizazz and attempted to unpack a few emotions in the mother-daughter relationship; Shaw's play expects the "taboo" subject to be controversial enough to carry the play. It's not, and that makes the lengthy monologues in which character's justify and condemn the sex trade all the more tedious.

Compared to the modernized visions of Brief Encounters or Sunday in the Park with George (Roundabout does well with imports, apparently), it's hard to call Mrs. Warren's Profession anything other than a lazy mess. For a good time, don't call this number.

Short-a-Day: Chris Adrian's "The Warm Fuzzies"

[One of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40]

Originally published in The New Yorker, Sept. 27, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 87.

There was a time, too, before they made albums or went on tours or appeared in Handycam videos produced and directed by their Aunt Jean, which aired (rather late at night) on the community cable channel and then, eventually, on Samaritan TV, when Molly liked being in the band, and liked being in the family....  Then one morning two months ago, she had woken up to find that the shine had gone off everything. It was a conversion as sudden as the one her parents had suffered. She had come to breakfast feeling unwell but not sick, and was puzzling over how it was different to feel like something was not right with you and yet feel sure you were in perfect health....

Oh, that's sneaky cool: talk about religion through the suddenly, strangely unblinded eyes of a young, maturing girl, one of six or seven children in the Carter Family. And make the setting a family band, in which things are communicated through music and dance, rather than straight language. And add in some sexual stuff, too, mainly with the latest foster child to be momentarily adopted into their lives, a young, scarred black boy named Peabo. Adrian has so much ammunition that he prevents his story from seeming trite, predictable, or done-before, and he loads up sentences--like the ones above--with lots of clever little details that only seem like tangents at first but in actually strengthen the setting. The word choice is particularly good--look at the use of "suffered" to describe a religious conversion; look how the "band" and the "family" are conflated. Best of all, Molly has a sarcastic inner voice, which helps Adrian show a crisis and a struggle in faith, rather than a simple rebellion or dismissal of it. Molly is trying to fit in . . . she's just having more and more trouble doing so.

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Short-a-Day: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "Birdsong"

[One of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40]

Originally published in The New Yorker, Sept. 20, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 93.

This is such a structurally tight story, with such lovely flourishes, that I don't mind not totally understanding the protagonist. How much are we really expected to understand another person, in any case? What stands out is how close Adichie comes to helping the reader understand what it's like to be a woman who is having an affair with a married man, and moreover, to be doing so in Lagos, Nigeria, where being an independent woman in that sort of relationship is apparently an even bigger issue. And she does so in very neat steps, jumping from the present--in which the protagonist sits in a car, watching an expensive-looking woman who happens to be looking at her. "She was the kind of woman I imagined my lover's wife was, a woman for whom things were done." From there, the story follows her memories as she establishes--on her own terms--the social distance between her and the people around her, from the way her co-worker Chikwado abases herself at work for the men to the way her lover's chauffeur scorns her, and the waiter ignores her. She is not a woman for whom things are done, in other words, but a woman who happens to be with a man for whom things are done, and that's a huge difference.

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THEATER: A Bright New Boise

Photo/Stephen Taylor 

In Samuel D. Hunter's previous play, Jack's Precious Moment, a genuine religious struggle was lost amid an exaggerated reality and an overly comic tone. His latest, A Bright New Boise, is all the more arresting, given its grounding in the mundane and ho-hum. Fifty-something Will (the tremendous Andrew Garman) is praying ("Now. Now. Now.") before an interview with the high-strung Pauline (Danielle Slavick): why is he so eager to get a minimum-wage, part-time employment at the Hobby Lobby (a big-box craft supply store)? It soon comes out that he's actually the father of fellow employee Alex (Matt Farabee), with whom he hopes to reconnect so that he has something to live for, since his prayers for the Rapture to come burn his ugly world away have gone unanswered: "Without God, all I am is a terrible father who lives in his car and works at Hobby Lobby--there has to be something more."

Davis McCallum's naturalistic approach works exceedingly well here, especially on Jason Simms's picture-perfect break-room set. Hobby Lobby promotional videos blare at all hours on the television--except for when the satellite feeds cross and accidentally show graphic surgical footage instead--and the microwave  makes loud clunking noises as it heats up Will's pathetic Chef Boyardee lunch. The Wal-Mart-greeter-like outfits and abstractly chippy corridor only re-enforce the "cheer" these workers have, as does Pauline's aggressively work-focused attitude, a sort of anti-faith-faith that is meant to keep her too busy to think about the quality of her life. Surely there must be more.

It's a cold, calculating look at the reasons for faith, but in a warm, seriocomic way that takes its characters seriously enough to laugh with them, not at them. (It's in many ways the sort of play you'd expect Neil LaBute. albeit a nicer version, to have written.) Nor is it dismissive of anyone's views: Leroy (John Patrick Doherty), Alex's foster brother and the sort of brash artist who sets out to "deliberately make you uncomfortable," is allowed to see Will's faith as nonsense, but that doesn't make it so. Coworker Anna (Sarah Nina Hayon) has a rough past of her own, but she uses her Lutheran faith as a tool, not a crutch. And though Alex is surrounded by all these views, he's developed one of his own, creating horrible rape-and-kidnapping stories about his past in order to gin up sympathy for what he sees as a bleak and hopeless future.

They joke, they smile, and they hurt, and they do it so sincerely that A Bright New Boise will break your heart. Over the course of these two hours, Will is given chance after chance to step away from his negative choices and to live in the present, rather than to desperately await the future. His cult-like church has been dissolved (pending the criminal investigation of its pastor), there's a hint of romance between him and Anna, there's an on-again-off-again relationship with his temperamental son, and even Leroy--grudgingly--is willing to give him a chance to make things right, and yet he is too invested in his memories, in his choices, to truly make a fresh start. The tragedy of Will's life is that there is more, but to embrace it, he must accept that his faith must be less.

For we in the audience, however, there is no such crisis of faith: we can accept, conscience clear and free, that A Bright New Boise is nothing less than a good, challenging play.

Short-a-Day: Wells Towers's "The Landlord"

[One of The New Yorker's 20 Under 40]

Originally published in The New Yorker, Sept. 13, 2010. Personal enjoyment rating (out of 100): 19.

Like the protagonist, landlord Coates Pruitt, this story is on its way to bankruptcy. Like most published authors, Towers is able to write coherently enough, but only a sentence by sentence basis: there's no clear train of thought linking the units of this story together. It begins on a comic note, describing Pruitt and his tenants: "Armando lives in one of the worst properties I own, an apartment complex so rife with mold and vermin that, when I sent a man to clean a vacant unit there, he developed an eye infection that didn't clear up for a month." It then switches to a serious note, dealing with a pending road trip for two of his laborers, Todd and Jason: "Todd is in his sixties, and he is a venomous human being. he is angry that I don't feel the same bile toward his co-workers or my tenants that he does. He is angry that, owing to the frailty of his liver and esophagus, he has only a couple of dozen good drunks left in him, and he must spend them wisely." The story then flips, yet again, to Coates's interactions with his daughter, Rhoda, who, being an artist, is able to make the case for this story: "'But in a broader sense it's about our collective lack of integrity and total fucking childishness in the wake of the financial crisis, i.e., the national epidemic of petulance and bratty outrage over the fact that poor people don't get to buy castles on credit anymore, that execs don't get G.D.P.-size bonuses, that not just any housewife with a real-estate license gets to be a millionaire, and that you can't stick a chopstick in a dog turd and sell it at Gagosian for the price of a yacht.'" 

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