"More Stares than Laughs"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
Alan Hruska,
author of this uninspired marital comedy at Off Broadway’s Cherry Lane, retired
as a law firm partner in 2001 when he was 68, but has since been very active
writing novels, film scripts, and plays, as well as doing some directing and even co-founding a publishing house. I’m not familiar with his earlier work, so I can
only hope it’s better than this blandly written, blandly performed, and blandly
directed (by actor Chris Eigeman) concatenation of scenes from a marriage. Ingmar
Bergman, where are you when we need you?
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| Katya Campbell, Jayce Brown. Photo: Richard Termine. |
Despite scattered
yock-lines, audiences are more likely to stare down this oddly titled play than
laugh it up as it recites the marital history of the good-looking, well-dressed
Joseph P. Allworthy (Jayce Brown, who bears a passing likeness to Dan Stevens
of Downton Abbey), occupation
unspecified, and the equally attractive Cleo (Katya Campbell, from Broadway’s DISGRACED). Cleo's a blonde fashion-plate of an
anthropologist who looks and acts as much like a member of that species as
Margaret Mead resembled Carole Lombard. (Costumier Jennifer Caprio offers
little help.)
 |
| Maury Ginsberg, Katya Campbell, Amy Hargreaves. Photo: Richard Termine. |
Following
an opening scene in which Joe picks up Cleo (their intellectual level is suggested via strained references to Trollope and Fielding), the
couple end up a week later at his apartment (decorated with a tortured self-portrait
of Egon Schiele), where an awkward sex scene ensues. Cleo subsequently reveals her pregnancy during a weird date in a French restaurant whose menus
are blank, whose only fresh dish is filet of sole, and where the waitress is
something of cuckoo bird (Amy Hargreaves).
 |
| Maury Ginsberg, Jayce Brown, Katya Campbell. Photo: Richard Termine. |
The
play moves through the next couple of decades to show what happens to Joe and
Cleo after they marry. Joe becomes wealthy working at a hedge fund; an oddball
doctor (Maury Ginsberg) at the hospital where Cleo gives birth informs her that
the baby has been lost (the nurse [Ms. Hargreaves] left him in the ladies’ room);
Joe and Cleo befriend Dorothy (Ms. Hargreaves), a biologist, and her philandering
physicist husband, Stephen (Mr. Ginsberg), opening the door for marital
infidelity to enter the plot; Dorothy and Cleo share a scene with a fillip of lesbianism;
Joe and Cleo’s home is burglarized by an English-accented thief (Mr. Ginsberg) who plays Russian roulette with his pistol aimed at Joe;
a hurricane threatens the couple’s Rhode Island summer house; a presumed Venetian tour guide (Mr.
Ginsberg) attempts to seduce the middle-aged Cleo; and, unbelievably, the play
ends with Joe and Cleo clinging to a buoy—played by a large, swinging crystal
chandelier that has gradually been descending throughout—after a Rhode Island tidal
wave strikes. Apart from Kevin Judge’s attractive unit set with a backdrop composed of
differently shaped window frames, colorfully lit by Matthew J. Fick, the buoy
is the single most creative thing on view.
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| Katya Campbell, Amy Hargreaves, Jayce Brown. Photo: Richard Termine. |
Mr. Hruska's stilted dialogue has the artificial ring heard in translations
from foreign drama, and the general tone straddles an uneven line between realism
and absurdism; as many “ideas” as possible are tossed in the pot to make the
conversations sound like high-toned comic banter. A principal theme concerns the importance of the choices we make,
each scene involving at least one important example, but the characters also touch
on sex, romantic love, fate, randomness, destiny, death, and morality, chattering as
well about adultery, cancer, and art, much of it either inconclusive, insignificant, or
outright ambiguous. To borrow one of Mr. Hruska’s
favorite words, most of the dialogue is “blithering.”
 |
| Jayce Brown, Katya Campbell. Photo: Richard Termine. |
LAUGH IT
UP, STARE IT DOWN concludes with a clumsily indeterminate final
curtain, creating some puzzlement as to
whether or not the play has ended. But there’s no mistaking the feeling of
relief when it’s clear the thing is over.
 |
| Jayce Brown, Amy Hargreaves, Maury Ginsberg, Katya Campbell. Photo: Richard Termine. |
OTHER VIEWPOINTS:
New York Times
Long Island Herald
TheaterMania
Huffington Post
LAUGH IT UP, STARE IT DOWN
New York Times
Long Island Herald
TheaterMania
Huffington Post
LAUGH IT UP, STARE IT DOWN
Cherry
Lane Theatre
38
Commerce Street, NYC
Through
October 10
