18. AMERICAN HERO
The title of Bess Wohl’s flavorsome but
occasionally over spiced new play at the Second Stage Uptown’s McGinn/Cazale Theatre is
a decent pun on a kind of sandwich and the people who, in this work at any
rate, might be considered the phrase’s ironic targets. Jamie (Ari Graynor, of
TV’s recent “Bad Teacher”) is a sexed-up 33-year-old divorcée, fired from her Supercuts
job for stealing mousse, and fighting a custody battle over her kids; Ted
(Jerry O’Connell) is a stalwart-looking family man in his early 40s, who looks
like he should be wearing a suit and tie rather than an orange counterman’s
jersey, and indeed was such a person—with an MBA no less—until laid off by Bank
of America; and Sheri (Erin Wilhelmi) is a slight, 18-year-old bundle of nerves
who cares for her ailing father and sleeps in her car between her two jobs. One
of those is at a Quiznos-like sandwich shop that has just opened at a strip
mall, where she and the others have been hired. Sheri is assigned to be the “baser,”
who opens the bread and adds mustard, mayonnaise, or whatever; Ted is the “finisher,”
who adds all the ingredients of meat, veggies, and the like; and Jamie is the “wrapper,”
who wraps the finished Torpedo, the franchise product.
Ari Gaynor, Jerry O'Connell, Erin Wilhelmi. Photo: Joan Marcus.
This needy trio is hired by the manager,
Bob (Daoud Heidami), an immigrant who could be Middle Eastern or South Asian
and who spent $450K for his piece of an unnamed national sandwich franchise we
soon learn is going to the dogs. The early scenes, played as broad farce, show
Bob hiring and then training his team in their culinary duties, reading
instructions from a thick manual that amusingly satirizes the company’s effort
to bolster the sense of importance in the responsibilities of slicing bread,
squirting sauce, slapping food, and serving the results. When, after a couple
of trial runs at making a sandwich in 20 seconds fail (of course, some people
take that long just to make up their minds), the audience claps when the team
succeeds in putting a sandwich together in 19 seconds.
Bob, the play’s most cartoonish person,
whose background in his native country as a dermatologist doesn’t jibe with the
loud, foolish way he’s forced to behave, fails to show up for the shop’s grand
opening, or afterward, and the play begins to shift into a variety of stylistically
different gears, including melodrama and surrealism (a living sandwich, played
by Mr. Heidami, appears in a dream scene). We see how the cynical Jamie, the
ambitious Ted (he hopes to move up the corporate ladder), and the
inferiority-plagued but resourceful-in-spite-of-herself Sheri cope with the lack of
managerial oversight, the depletion of their food supplies, and the receipt of directions
from an out-of-touch corporate headquarters to keep the shop going.
Their jobs are so precious to them in
the failed American economy that, instead of simply walking out and finding
other equally mundane positions elsewhere, Jamie, Ted, and Sheri determine to
show their American stick-to-itiveness. Using their survival instincts, they find
creative ways of keeping the shop alive with sandwiches of their
own devising. This type of American heroism eventually is rewarded in a
climactic scene involving a surprise visit from “corporate” (Mr. Heidami again), although this representative of the company will first get in a few licks of his own against the scary
system of which he’s as much a victim (albeit on a higher pay scale) as are the
basers, finishers, and wrappers at the bottom.
Ms. Wohl is adept at creating comic
situations and funny dialogue, but she’s not yet as capable of creating a
sustained tone that keeps you accepting her characters and story in what is set
up to represent a believable world with convincing characters. Dean Laffrey’s
set, which—apart from the deliberate lack of sandwich prices—is so naturalistic
you feel like placing an order yourself, received its own article in the New
York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/29/theater/dean-laffrey-on-his-set-for-american-hero.html?_r=0),
although such detailed exactitude in creating a stage setting for a restaurant
can be traced back to David Belasco’s Broadway production of THE GOVERNOR’S LADY
(1912), which replicated not only the look but the cooking smells of a Child’s
Restaurant.
The cast, under Leigh Silverman’s fine
direction, is excellent at making their thinly written “sandwich artists” seem
realer than they are, although Mr. Heidami is better at his later characters
than he is as the overwrought Bob. Ms. Gaynor has just the right sexual
insouciance to make Jamie’s opening scenes work, but the character’s
development into a knife-wielding hellion is something no actress could make persuasive.
Ted also has elements that are questionable but Mr. O’Connell is usually very
good at making you accept them. Ms. Wilhelmi, who was excellent earlier this
year in CORE VALUES and THE GREAT IMMENSITY, uses a high, piping voice that can
be annoying, but she’s a sui generis kind of actress and will surely continue
to be seen, especially while she continues to look as young as she does (she
holds a BFA from the University of Evansville).
AMERICAN HERO, produced as part of a
program for emerging playwrights, deals satirically with serious issues regarding
corporate America and the struggles of the minimum-wage working class, but its
themes are sandwiched between characters and plotting that don’t always combine
the best ingredients. I recommend the sweet green peppers.