“Snookered”
This week, the nation’s foremost con artist, Donald J. Trump,
blasted the Democratic Party’s attempt to sink Brett Kavanaugh’s SCOTUS
nomination as
a “con job.” And just today, the New
Yorker’s online “Sunday Archive” headlined its anthology of “grifts, cons,
and rackets” as “Schemes,
Frauds, and Swindles.”
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| Ben Schnetzer, Max Gordon Moore. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
What all this has to do with the Manhattan Theatre Club’s
production of Richard Bean’s (One Man,
Two Guvnors) fitfully entertaining British farce, The Nap, which opened a few days ago at the Samuel J. Friedman
Theatre, is not for me to divulge. But it does seem there’s something cooking
in the zeitgeist.
The Nap refers to
the felt covering on a snooker table, snooker being a pool-like game,
created in 19th-century India by British army officers, and widely popular in Great
Britain. A large snooker table dominates the stage during those scenes set at a
British Legion Snooker Room and those at a Sheffield, Yorkshire, venue where the World Snooker
Championship is played out and televised for an audience of over 20
million.
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| Max Gordon Moore, John Ellison Conlee. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
As Dylan Spokes (Ben Schnetzer), the handsome, working-class,
vegetarian lad from Sheffield, who will be competing for the
championship, explains: “Playing with the nap, the ball will run straight with
the natural line. Playing against the nap, the ball can deviate and drift off
line. I play straight.” This, in a sense, is the play’s theme as Dylan, who honors
the god of snooker, gets tangled up with a shady bunch who have another sort of
snookering on their minds.
Occasionally reminiscent of a Joe Orton or Martin McDonough black
comedy, The Nap, which premiered in
2016 at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre (where the World Snooker Championships are
actually held), centers on Dylan’s preparation for the upcoming championship
series.
Surrounding him is a rogue’s gallery of colorfully cartoonish
characters: his former drug-dealing, bank-robbing dad, Bobby Spokes (John
Ellison Conlee), who offers coaching advice; his flashy manager, Tony DanLino
(Max Gordon Moore), who takes 20 percent of Dylan’s winnings, plus tax; Mohammed
Butt (Bhavesh Patel), claiming to be a security agent needing to confirm Dylan’s
integrity via a urine sample; and Eleanor Lavery (Heather Lind), a gorgeously
sexy female copper concerned about possible match-fixing.
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| Ben Schnetzer, Heather Lind. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Then there are Stella Spokes (Johanna Day), Dylan’s blowzy, boozy, bottle blonde
mother, separated from Bobby; Danny Killeen (Thomas Jay Ryan), Stella’s sleazy,
deodorant-avoiding, Irish-accented boyfriend; and the comic pièce de résistance,
Waxy Bush (Alexandra Billings), a heavily made-up, white-suited, transgender woman
gangster, with a prosthetic arm, who gets laughs by the tried and true (but
overdone here) means of ridiculous malapropisms. One of the better ones goes: “Someone
been making allegations? Bobby, are you one the allegators?”
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| Max Gordon Moore, Johanna Day, Alexandra Billings. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Waxy, who’s been sponsoring Dylan, wants him to repay the boatload of money he owes her by throwing a frame in his championship game, enabling
her to place a big bet based on his tanking. This or-else demand tests Dylan’s
moral fortitude while setting up a series of comical complications, some of
them enacted in a hotel room and Waxy’s tacky country house.
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| Ben Schnetzer, Johanna Day. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
There are also a couple of effectively staged snooker sequences
presented—along with dryly satirical broadcast commentary—via a huge overhead
TV screen showing in live time all the shots being made by Dylan (Schnetzer
trained diligently for these) against two wordless competitors (played by US National
Snooker champ Ahmed Aly Elsayed). The outcome of the final match is left open,
so the ending can vary depending on what happens at a particular performance.
These scenes, however carefully prepared, are nonetheless the production’s most
riveting.
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| Max Gordon Moore, Johanna Day, Thomas Jay Ryan, Alexandra Billings. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
David Rockwell, flying and sliding his substantial-looking
sets up and down, in and out, Justin Townsend, providing perfect lighting, and Kaye Voyce, dressing
everyone convincingly, do their best on the visual side. Director Daniel Sullivan,
using a mostly American cast speaking with generally reasonable facsimiles of
Yorkshire accents, holds the pacing back too much, and the humor always seems bubbling
just beneath the surface. It breaks through too rarely, though, to make The Nap as satisfyingly funny as it keeps
promising to be.
The best comical moments come when Bobby struggles to cite a
forgotten movie title, throwing out one half-remembered hint after another as his
listeners eagerly try to connect the dots. But, like Waxy’s mangled vocabulary,
or her double entendre name, these bits tend to use a hammer to bang in a comical
thumbtack.
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| Ahmed Aly Elsayed, Ethan Hova, Ben Schnetzer. Photo: Joan Marcus. |
Schnetzer’s credible presence helps keep Bean’s don’t-trust-what-you-see
plot (redolent of The Sting) from losing
too much contact with reality, and there are good turns by several others, especially
Conlee and Billings. However, when a game of snooker becomes a play’s most
gripping part, it’s hard for an audience not to feel it’s been snookered.
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 W. 47th St., NYC
Through November 11