Plays by People Other than Playwrights
Few things were as painful to sit through as We Live Here and The Wood, both Off-Broadway. The former was a well-upholstered melodrama by actress Zoe Kazan that required more than a little suspension of disbelief (as well as a conscious forgetting of the tropes of Gothic literature to remain surprised by a mad sister playing the piano during a lashing rainstorm); the latter was another play from documentary filmmaker Dan Klores, a clunky affair about real-life journalist Mike McAlary that conveyed neither the excitement of a newsroom nor McAlary’s particular investigate reporting gifts.

Musicals at The York
The best thing about this year’s Road to Qatar and Tomorrow Morning was that they were both short. The worst thing was…just about everything else. Qatar aimed for dumb fun but only succeeded at being dumb, while Tomorrow Morning tried in vain for an elegiac tone that Once is currently nailing effortlessly. Neither show had anything fresh to say, and what was said wasn’t worth hearing. Not a great sign for the future of original musicals not based on movies.

Adam Rapp
The infuriating thing about Adam Rapp is that audiences know he can be capable of thrilling theater (Red Light Winter, The Metal Children). This year didn’t feature works that approached either of those, though it wasn’t for lack of trying: including The Hallway Trilogy, Manhattan saw five Adam Rapp plays in 2011, most of which featured the array of sordid frat boys and gleeful exhibitions of psychical and psychic suffering that has made his name. The final offering, Dreams of Flying Dreams of Falling, was at least set in an upscale home, albeit one with a lion in the basement and a rain of geese. Is it any wonder Charles Isherwood wrote a heartfelt plea, begging to recuse himself from reviewing Rapp? Go away, Adam Rapp, so we can miss you for a while.

Period Musicals
How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Baby It’s You! The People in the Picture. Play It Cool. The Blue Flower. Bonnie & Clyde. On a Clear Day You Can See Forever. At some point during these musicals, the design teams and/or the writers and directors bashed audiences over the head with the time period, whether with silhouetted breadlines (Bonnie & Clyde), poorly written, hard-boiled dialogue (Play It Cool) or eye-gouging colors (On a Clear Day). In the case of the latter, who realized that the ’70s were quite so ugly?

The Public’s Shakespeare
A quick Beyoncé dance number in Love’s Labor’s Lost. A Lear so doddering so early on that we sympathize with Goneril and Regan. Dildo-sporting demons cavorting throughout Measure for Measure. An All’s Well That Ends Well that takes its title so literally there’s no room for doubt. All presented with a resolutely contemporary take on the dialogue that often twists it into pretzels to sound impromptu. Is The Public winning any fans with its strenuous, trying-too-hard-to-be-hip approaches to Shakespeare? As a not-for-profit company, it’s hard to forgive them for using their resources on a total of five Shakespearean plays this year, when so many other companies continue to present the same canon.

As for that whole half-full thing…you can put me on the record as saying I have rarely been more moved, tantalized or entertained than I was by Playwrights Horizons’ Kin, Go Back to Where You Are and Completeness, the Second Stage production of Lynn Nottage’s By the Way, Meet Vera Stark, Keen Company’s Lemon Sky revival and the smart-about-being-dumb Lysistrata Jones. Memories of those shows (and a few others) will no doubt help get me through 2012.

Betty Gilpin, Jessica Collins and Jeremy Shamos in We Live Here.
PHOTO BY joan marcus

In his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, William Faulkner made an ominous assessment of new writing: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it…Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about.”

It is, of course, impossible that Faulkner jumped into a time machine to see Adam Rapp’s Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling in 2011 before making that speech, but he may as well have, for Rapp’s work fits the bill as a fearful and small-minded work of writing that misses the point of the human condition entirely.

The play opens in the dining room of an opulent Connecticut home (the cleanly elegant set is by Andrew Boyce and Takeshi Kata), but what promises to be a fast-paced society comedy descends, within minutes, to awkward one-liners about Jesus and poor people.

The play guides us through an absurd dinner party (we’ve never seen an absurd dinner party featuring the wealthy, have we?), in which the hostess is drunk before the table is set. An African-American maid is patronized in Jim-Crow-Law fashion; dopes that still happen in upscale Connecticut homes. Wild goose is served. There are seductions. There is sex on the dining room table. There is poison in a goblet. There is suicide. And, of course, there is a lion in the basement. Other than that, not much happens.

The actors all put in noble efforts. New York favorites Cotter Smith and Reed Birney turn in likeable performances, and are both convincing Yaleys (which is about as much nuance of character as they’re permitted).  Christine Lahti steals the show with her wicked, husband-poisoning turn as the lady of the house. It’s difficult to know whether Katherine Waterson and Shane McRae as the incompetent adult-children were directed to be quite so changeless, but the text does seem to call for static insipidity, and they perform that nicely. In any case, Neil Pepe directs with an eye firmly on the cheap laugh, but given the material, one can’t blame him for finding something to keep his eye on. In a play in which no one transforms, grows, or learns anything, character development is out the window.

When the 80 minutes of soulless contrivance winds to an end, and a giant, maimed lioness in chains appears onstage (apparently an emblem for the brutality and brokenness of the rich), one is tempted to weep for Christine Lahti, until then playing a character who had no feelings, placing her hands inside the wounds of the dying lioness, trying to weep over an emblem that had been permitted no meaning. To watch such talented actors wasted on such soulless material, trying to make meaning out of it, becomes a play unto itself. A tragic one.

The real shame in all of this is that absurdity, when applied appropriately, holds the key to opening and implicating an audience. The absurd in theater creates a primal and universal symbol system through which meaning can be accessed democratically. But absurdity sans meaning is just…boring.

The day Rapp writes a play about the human heart in conflict with itself (rather than the human ego masturbating with itself) is the day we’ll have the next great American play. He’s a playwright of great talent and potential, and needs only to find his heart. Let’s look forward to that, shall we?

Dreams of Flying, Dreams of Falling

Through Oct. 30, Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. (betw. 3rd & 4th Aves.), www.atlantictheater.org; $65.