33 SOMEWHERE
FUN
The
Vineyard Theatre, where SOMEWHERE FUN is playing, is definitely not what the
title of this new play by Jenny Schwartz suggests. The actors may be having
fun, especially veterans Kate Mulgrew, Kathleen Chalfant, and Mary Schultz, but
for most audience members (admittedly, not all, if the occasional laughs are to
be considered) even OEDIPUS REX might have been more amusing. At least it would
have had characters you could identify with and understand, with language used
for purposes of communication among the people on stage and with the audience.
In Ms. Schwartz's surrealistic, absurdist world, language is used to demonstrate
the impossibility of communication, but this devolves into a demonstration by the
playwright of how cleverly she can handle it; despite the existence of mostly
screwy characters and a sort of plot, none of it coheres long enough to keep
you interested, especially when drawn out over three acts and nearly two and a
half hours.
The wonder is that the above-named
actresses, and the rest of the mostly excellent cast as well, are so good at
making their often nonsensical, elliptical, and topsy-turvy sentences seem
grounded in some kind of inner reality. But once you catch on that very little
of what is being said is spoken for anything other than the sake of its own
cleverness, all the best acting in the world, and even the smartest directing
(Anne Kauffman does her admirable best in this capacity) is not going to make
it easier to sit through what becomes an endurance test of concentration. If
you go, be sure to take double (or triple) your normal dose of No-Doze or
whatever else you need to keep your eyelids open.
Of course, the linguistic tomfoolery
in a play like this must be balanced by symbolic behavior, most notably in
SOMEWHERE FUN by the death of the logorrheic Upper East Side realtor Rosemary
Rappaport (Ms. Mulgrew), who slowly melts to death before our eyes, ending in a
puddle of black sludge and a skull that is treated by a policewoman (Brooke Bloom)
as if it were any ordinary corpse (still, stagehands in biohazard suits are
required to remove it). This combination
of tricky language and weird images reminds me of the plays of Eugene Ionesco;
Ionesco, however, usually made his plays compellingly human, with definite stakes
motivating the characters. Here one gives up trying to determine what those
stakes are when it becomes clear there are none, or very vague ones.
This is not to say the characters
live in a vacuum. Rosemary is estranged from her son, Benjamin (Greg Keller),
and her husband has run off with another woman; still, her never having heard
of the Internet seems absurd even in an absurdist world. The aging, elegant
socialite Evelyn Armstrong (Ms. Chalfant) is confined to a wheelchair and then
a hospital bed because she is dying of cancer (an internal reference to the actress's
performance some years back in WIT?), but any suffering we see plays second fiddle to her supercilious
attitude toward those around her, her gibes often spoken to the baby in the
womb of her caretaker, Lolita (Mary Elena Ramirez). She also has a daughter,
Beatrice (Ms. Bloom), whose face was bitten off by a Dalmatian, but,
thankfully, no attempt is made to suggest this with makeup. The white-haired Cecelia
(Ms. Schultz) comes closest to seeming like a real person, with her computer
literacy expressed through her use of an Iphone (a device totally alien to
Rosemary) and success at finding a boyfriend via social media.
I don’t mean to imply that Schwartz’s verbiage
is all business and no play, since there are some really clever and even funny
twists in the things her people say, especially early on. For example, there’s Evelyn’s crack: “Everything
happens for a reason. With the exception of anal cancer.” And buried beneath
the nonstop chatter are themes of loss, regret, suffering, and
alienation. It’s just that once the conceit is established it has nowhere to
go, and without consistently interesting characters speaking the lines and the
semblance of a plot to make you care it’s very easy to begin regretting that
theatre etiquette doesn’t permit you to check your smart phone to see if
someone out there is saying something you really want to hear. Apart from the dextrous
performances of Mulgrew, Chalfant, and Schultz, SOMEWHERE FUN, I must repeat,
is not.
