“Some Unenchanted Evening”
Chances are the title “Happy Talk” immediately brings to
mind the song of that name in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical, South Pacific. Though never actually
sung, it plays a thematic role in the New Group’s production of actor-playwright Jesse
Eisenberg’s only intermittently funny, mostly unsuccessful, eponymous dark comedy, spryly staged by
Scott Elliot. Not only is one of the play’s two principal characters, Lorraine (Susan Sarandon, imperfectly cast), playing Bloody Mary (talk about strange casting!) in the local Jewish Community Center’s production of South Pacific, she herself might be said
to be a victim (among other things psychological) of a “happy talk” syndrome.
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| Marin Ireland, Susan Sarandon. Photo: Monique Carboni. |
As the other principal character, Ljuba (Marin Ireland, Summer and Smoke), an accented, Serbian
immigrant, observes, Lorraine avoids the pain in her life by trying to smile it
away: “You make everything into something happy. I watch you: is like magic. Someone say something sad or angry and you
just pretend like what they say is happy. Is like you don’t even hear them
sometimes. Is a gift, in some way.”
Lorraine’s real gift, if such it could be called, is her ability to ignore the needs of anyone other
than herself.
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| Daniel Oreskes, Susan Sarandon, Nico Santos. Photo: Monique Carboni. |
Superficially, her life seems fine. A narcissistic 60-year-old
(which the 72-year-old Sarandon pulls off easily), her life is dedicated to acting
in community theatre productions, where the fellowship she shares (or believes
she does) with her collaborators makes her think of them (if not they of her)
as family. Someone who needs always to be the center of attention, and never
stops nattering away, she considers herself the group’s indisputable star
although she seems only to be cast in supporting roles; her finest accomplishment
is cited as the secondary role of Ellen, the soldier’s wife in Miss Saigon. When she sings (a
misleading verb) “Bali Ha'i,” you actually need the recorded version that follows
to show how it ought to be done.
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| Susan Sarandon, Marin Ireland, Nico Santos. Photo: Monique Carboni. |
She wears nice, casual tops (excellent costumes by Clint Ramos) and lives
in a comfortable New Jersey house. Its Raymour and Flanigan-style living room (designed
by Derek McLane, with suitable lighting by Jeff Croiter)—including posters of
her community theatre shows—resembles the generic, white, middle-class beige
interior lived in (and satirized) by the black family in the Pulitzer-winning Fairview.
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| Nico Santos, Susan Sarandon, Marin Ireland. Photo: Monique Carboni. |
However, Lorraine’s mother, Ruthie—offstage and never seen—is
seriously declining and, using a buzzer, reliant on the diapering and other services
of the pretty, eternally upbeat (speaking of happy talkers), 40-year-old Ljuba.
The latter has been both her caretaker and the family’s general factotum for
the past six months, and never complains about the demands made by the crabby Ruthie,
whom someone calls “a shriveled old cunt.”
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| Daniel Oreskes, Nico Santos, Susan Sarandon, Marin Ireland. |
Lorraine can’t bear to even look at her mother. And, while
she likes to say sweet nothings to her laconic, morose, and sullen lump of a Laze-E-Boy-sitting
spouse, Bill, who suffers from MS and ED, she consigns his
most pressing needs to Ljuba. Daniel Oreskes’s (Hir) Bill is vinegary enough to make lemon seem sweet; it's easy to see why.
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| Marin Ireland, Susan Sarandon, Tedra Millan, Photo: Monique Carboni., |
Lorraine also has a daughter, a hateful misery named Jennifer
(Tedra Millan, The Wolves, perfectly
nasty), a Noam Chomsky-reading radical, who enters late in the play, despises
her mother and her middle-class life, but demonstrates childlike affection for
Bill. She even rejects her name in favor of “Darby”: “I go by Darby because you gave me a shit name that’s stuck in your
antiquated binary bubble.”
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| Susan Sarandon, Marin Ireland, Tedra Millan. Photo: Monique Carboni. |
A plot develops when Lorraine learns that Ljuba has managed
to stash away $15,000 toward paying $30,000 to some TBD man with American citizenship
for a green card marriage so she can escape the constraints of her undocumented
status. Lorraine, like Yenta the Matchmaker in Fiddler on the Roof, makes a match between Ljuba and Ronny (Nico Santos,
Crazy Rich Asians, stereotypical but
sweet), a flamboyantly gay, Asian-American actor playing Lt. Cable to her
Bloody Mary, Ronny lives with his boyfriend but needs the cash. Predictably, Ronny and
Lorraine engage in the tiresome, gay trope of quoting Broadway
lyrics.
There are a number of implausibilities, like the long, unfunny sequence of taking photos to establish Ronny and Ljuba's ongoing relationship. Oddly, it involves Lorraine’s old Hasselblad instead of the more obvious phone camera most people would use. If it's meant to get laughs, it doesn't. There's also the flaming Ronny’s being cast as the romantic Cable; the ballet scenario Ljuba
creates in which she’ll be the romantic heroine and her boss the witch (hint, hint), and so on. So many such contrivances stick in one's critical throat it's impossible to swallow most of what happens in the play.
Throughout this intermissionless, hour-and-45-minute
exercise, Eisenberg drops foreshadowing bricks that fall so loudly you have a
good idea of what’s coming almost as surely as if a gun had been introduced. Nevertheless,
when predictability becomes reality, your stomach will churn from what the
playwright’s twist of the dial requires Lorraine to do. We may have had a notion
of what was coming but not to the discouragingly exaggerated degree Eisenberg
takes it.
Sarandon, for all her intelligence and charisma, seems out
of place in this particular household; she captures her role’s darker side but
the manic comedy parts fall short. You may even wonder why she chose this vehicle
for her first New York stage role in 10 years. Still, you can’t deny viscerally
hating Lorraine at the end, which is very much to the star's credit.
Ireland, as Ljuba, sports a totally unconvincing accent and spouts dialogue it’s
unlikely would come from this Serbian immigrant. Nonetheless, it's fun to see her take this pleasantly kooky detour into comedy from her usually dour roles in
serious dramas. As a friend accurately mentioned, it’s hard not to hear her chipper,
high-pitched voice without thinking of Gilda Radner.
Call me a cockeyed optimist but I look forward to some
enchanted evening when Jesse Eisenberg will no longer wonder how it feels
(younger than springtime, perhaps?) to make us fall in love with a wonderful
play. Happy Talk is not nearly that one.
The Pershing Square Signature Center/Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre
480 W. 42nd St., NYC
Through June 16
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