I wanted it to end.
No review of mine for this production would be completely honest if I did not admit that; after about sixty minutes, I was fidgeting in my seat, and with ten minutes to go I even muttered under my breath.
To be sure, had the play been longer than it was I would likely have had a few more chuckles coerced out of me by the impeccable technique of Mr. De Shields, or I would have been impressed again by some of the fine production design elements, or I might even have found a line or two of Mr. Mamet’s to pique a kind of interest (“Not hungry,” was one of the last lines to actually make me think), but ultimately I could not find these small triumphs to be worth it.
Last night was my first encounter with this play, so I am unsure how much of the faulty rhythm and incoherence can be attributed to the actors, and how much is the more permanent error of the author. It seemed little more than a string of self-indulgent semi-poetic All About Eve scenes mixed with some bizarre spoofs. While some of the “onstage” interludes were inspired in their wackiness, what’s the point? To show that a life in the theater invariably involves a lot of bad productions?
Similarly, I couldn’t invest in either of the characters – stock types, although Mr. De Shields fares much better than his Keanu Reeves-y counterpart – and so couldn’t care much about their anxieties and aspirations.
Early in the show, Mr. De Shields utters a foul word about one of his costars. It gets a laugh: mostly, I think, from shock value. In other words, it’s a cheap trick. Unfortunately, with no real emotional center, the play never gets any classier.
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