“The One that Got Away”
Edmund Gowery, the playwright character at the heart of Nantucket Sleigh Ride, John Guare’s energetically performed
but comically jumbled, thinly entertaining new memory play at the Mitzi E.
Newhouse, has only one play to his credit, The
Internal Structure of Stars, now forgotten.  |
| Stacy Sargent, John Larroquette. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
In Nantucket Sleigh
Ride, set in 2010, Mundie (John Larroquette), following fateful events on
the eponymous New England island in the summer of ‘75, was never struck again
by creative lightning; he’s given up playwriting and become a successful Wall Streeter.
He was only 30 at the time but he’s expunged what happened from his memory.
However, the arrival in his office, one hot summer day, of a
zombie-like brother and sister named Poe (Adam Chanler-Beret) and Lilac (Grace
Rex), demonstrates that you can’t forget your past. Poe and Lilac,
preadolescents in 1975 who’ve gone completely blank on what happened that
summer, have searched Mundie out to help restore their memories. Bewildered and
disturbed, he locks himself in the toilet as thoughts of 35 years earlier come flooding
back.
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| John Larroquette. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
Thus are we thrust back to that fateful August within the framework
of a tale narrated by Mundie, who also plays himself as a young man, although,
to our eyes, he remains the tall, pudgy, white-haired fellow we first met. What
we see is an absurdist farce in which, it being the summer of ’75, not only is
everybody reading Jaws and seeing the
movie but Roy Scheider (Will Swenson) himself gets some stage time.
Guare also provides so many references to The Internal Structure of Stars,
including quotes, that—given its autobiographical nature as a memory play about
an 11-year-old boy named Edmund—it practically becomes a play within the play. Moreover,
all the Nantucket folks we meet have some connection to a recent amateur
production, the real motivating factor in the action.
This extends to the African-American policewoman, Aubrey Coffin
(Stacy Sargent), who played Edmund’s fatally ill mother in the local staging. It’s she who
Mundie recalls having summoned him to Nantucket to answer questions about a
child porn scheme allegedly being run by the tenants of the house he bought as an
investment but never visited.
The porn thread fades as various nutty characters appear in
a string-of-pearls plot circling around Mundie’s having angered the star of the town's production, Elsie Spooner (Clea Alsip), and everyone else, by rudely refusing her
invitation to attend.
 |
| John Larroquette, Will Swenson. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
Elsie, who grew up in the house Mundie owns, is not only the
mother of Poe and Lilac, but is also the daughter of a famous children’s author,
which thus connects to our seeing the deceased Walt Disney (Will Swenson) in
the guise of a cryonically frozen, icicle-covered golem. In one of the play’s satirical
deflections, it allows Mundie to rail against how reprehensibly Disney films adapt
the stories on which they’re based.
And so on, with curious situations including rivalries between
Elsie’s child psychoanalyst husband, Schuyler (Douglas Sills), and her lobster-bearing
lover, MacPhee (Will Swenson); the lobster’s death by electrocution; Mundie’s
affair with Antonia (Tina Benko), the gorgeous, flamenco-dancing, multilingual
wife of his lawyer, Gilbert (Jordan Gelber); a chance to write a screenplay for
a remake by Roman Polanski of Hitchcock’s Suspicion, with Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, and
similar screwy infusions.
Oh yes, we mustn’t forget Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges (Germán
Jaramillo), blind and elderly, who taps his walking stick while wandering through
the action, with frequent references to his book, Labyrinths, and
a string of elusive aphorisms.
 |
| Clea Alsip, Will Swenson, Germán Jaramillo, John Larroquette, Tina Benko. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
Perhaps we’re meant to see Nantucket Sleigh Ride—a title inspired by what happens to whalers
after they’ve harpooned their prey and get taken for a possibly fatal ride—as a
near-surrealistic labyrinth through which we’re taken for a theatrical jaunt. (In
2012, Princeton’s McCarter Theatre presented an earlier version under the title
Are You There, McPhee.)
Wild as the trip sounds, the whale it’s chasing is laughter,
and, despite a highly qualified cast, the response is rarely more than mild
amusement, not hilarity. Even under the direction of Guare-master Jerry Zaks,
who helped make several earlier Guare works click, his knack for fast-paced staging
fails to ignite the kind of comic reaction needed. Too often, the actors are
forced to go overboard for laughs, and there's an insufficient supply of real wit on board.
A significant problem is that having the affable, generally impressive, 71-year-old
Larroquette play his much younger self, while shifting back and forth from his
senior persona, is an obstacle to buying Mundie’s shtick. There's simply too wide a disconnect between the dude in his time that the characters see and the old guy past his prime we're looking at.
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| Adam Chanler-Beret, Grace Rex. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
I enjoyed the work of Sills and Benko, in particular, but the
takeaway kudos go to Sargent, playing not only the cop but Mundie’s New York
temporary secretary. Sargent, a black actress, uses sharply different but
always authentic accents for both, and then adds a third, Nu Yawky one, for Edmund’s
mother in a scene she recites from Mundie’s play, which she did in high school.
Her scene is the show’s unsung highlight.
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| Above: Germán Jaramillo, Clea Alsip, Douglas Sill, Will Swenson, Tina Benko. Below: Adam Chanler-Beret, John Larroqquete, Grace Rex. Photo: T. Charles Erickson. |
This idea of using different accents—not mentioned in the
script—would seem the brainstorm of Zaks, who exercises his craft on David Gallo's interesting set of a shiny marble floor fronting a wall consisting of 30 dark-wood doors, each with a brass
handle, lined up across the background in three tiered rows of ten each.
Instead of opening like doors, though, they slide like panels
in multiple units to either side. This provides a high space for partial
exteriors, like a house’s gable; a central space, midway up, on which
characters appear in rapid succession to talk with Mundie, who faces us and
away from them; and a floor-level part, through which a Magritte-inspired living
room rolls on and off. The show’s physical attractiveness is further heightened
by the vivid lighting of Howell Binkley and the charming costumes of Emily
Rebholz.
Nantucket Sleigh Ride gets
a polished production but it carries too much absurdist blubber to make its pursuit
more than momentarily worthwhile. This is a big one that got away.
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre/Lincoln Center
10 Lincoln Center Plaza, NYC
Through May 5
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