Photo by Joan Marcus

We first meet Jamie (Jeremy Strong) with Frank (Keith Nobbs), two Jersey kids who were friends as young children but who haven’t seen each other in over two decades, having treaded different paths. Jamie, at 32, has become a well-respected journo, living with a beautiful girlfriend, Paige (Sarah Goldberg, in fine form) in Brooklyn. Frank has headed to upstate New York, pursuing a gay lifestyle and having rebounded from skirmishes with the law.

Their divergent lives dovetail in playwright Amy Herzog’s The Great God Pan, making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons. Frank is bringing up sexual abuse charges against his father (never seen) and suggests that Jamie might have a reason to be a part of said lawsuit. Jamie politely demurs; he has no such connection to Frank’s father. He can barely remember what the man looked like.

But then he starts learning things. Like the fact that as a four-year-old, he spent a week living with Frank’s family while his parents, Cathy and Doug (Becky Ann Baker and a particularly elliptical Peter Friedman), worked through some early troubles. Jamie is aghast. How could he, a reporter, not have known this information? Or remembered it?

Then details come back to him – a scratchy couch, a quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “A Musical Instrument,” which lends itself to Herzog’s important title. These oblique fragments aren’t enough to reveal the full tapestry of Jamie’s, but make him aware that there are more holes than he ever imagined. Suddenly, Jamie wonders if this can excuse some of the chapters in his life of which he is less proud – estrangement from his parents, sexual difficulties with Sarah.  Such an awful discovery could hurt him, but it would also, in a morbid way, be a gift.  And these details matter to the playwright as well. Pan is a woodland god-goat who invented music by attacking plants to invent a reed pipe; it’s a metaphor for a violent sex act that ultimately gave birth to beauty. In this way, Herzog uses deft imagery to make her layered work that much richer, and also illustrate the horrific act on which Frank opens the proverbial Pandora’s Box without having to be explicit in doing so. The nimble, almost subversive way in which Herzog entwines subject, theme, and imagery, makes Pan register dramatically and emotionally.

It’s possible that not all of Jamie’s circumstances can be pinpointed to a repressed early childhood trauma, but like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once advised, Herzog lives in the questions.  And director Carolyn Cantor, who also helmed Herzog’s last PH production, 2010’s After the Revolution, knows how to mine even the seemingly lightest of moments for both maximum ambiguity and specificity. (Similarly, Mark Wendland’s landscape-patterned set makes scenes feel both personally localized and as though they could be taking place anywhere.)  This includes what initially seem like tangential scenes between Paige, a dancer-turned-social work student, and Joelle (Erin Wilhelmi), the anorexic teenager she has been assigned to help. Both young women have been damaged, hurt in ways that Herzog never spells out, but that Cantor’s cast intuits to the audience. And their scenes reflect upon Jamie’s plight in a dual way. It makes us want to shake him and say “Grow up! Find out the truth so you can move on!” It also reminds us to be patient; everyone reaches personal breakthroughs in their own time.

Strong embodies Jamie’s man-child solipsism with the typical polish audiences have come to expect from him, one of his generation’s great actors, peeling back layers of protection to reveal desperation and fear. Nobbs, too, is similarly moving, and handles the restraint with which Herzog has drawn Frank – why can’t he just come out and say everything at once?! – with great care. One wishes for more scenes with the two of these actors, not to mention the rest of the cast that fills up the two- and three-handers that comprise each scene (Joyce Van Patten is also magnificent in the small role of a babysitter who once cared for Frank and Jamie), but each characters’ appearances have been carefully apportioned. This is a polished work as deep as it is rich. In Pan, a play about the betrayal of memory, Herzog has crafted a work to remember.

The Great God Pan

At Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street. Through Jan. 13. http://www.playwrightshorizons.org/shows/plays/great-god-pan/.

A cruel social joke around the play is that upon first seeing Charlie (Shuler Hensley), one might think that Hunter’s title refers to his protagonist. Charlie, an online English instructor, is morbidly obese (costume designer Jessica Pabst has crafted an eerily convincing padded costume to make him appear to be around 600 pounds), and doing himself no healthy favors. He rarely leaves the couch we see center stage of the Idaho one-bedroom apartment in which he lives. Charlie lives alone, but spends most of his time connected to a variety of people, mostly the students he instructs – only via audio, so they have no idea of his size – and his nurse neighbor, Liz (Cassie Beck), who enables him as much as she cautions him about his unhealthy habits.

Hunter re-teams with director Davis McCallum, who helmed his last work, A Bright New Boise, which was as close to a perfect play I’ve ever seen on the New York stage. Both works are uniquely stylized ruminations on what both family and faith can do for people, and do to people. Charlie still aches from the loss of his lover Alan, who slowly lost his will to live out of Mormon guilt over his homosexuality. And while Charlie seems to feel that he is on borrowed time (every movement and breath requires a herculean amount of energy from Charlie, which Hensley manages with painstaking grace), he creates a de facto family by reaching out to people from both past and present, in the form of his nasty estranged daughter Ellie (Reyna de Courcy), from an early marriage to Mary (Tasha Lawrence), and to Elder Thomas (Cory Michael Smith), a nineteen-year-old Mormon missionary who ended up at Charlie’s door and keeps getting invited back.

Whale could easily show the erasure marks and indentations of an emerging playwright in a less visionary writer’s hands, but Hunter’s work, set over the course of five days and with multiple nods to Melville and the Biblical story of Jonah, never feels overly tidy nor pretentious. He even manages to find dramatically necessary ways to provide exposition, thanks to his skill with dialogue. McCallum guides a superb ensemble to fully-realized, humane performances. His supporting cast skirts cardboard characterizations: on paper, Ellie comes off as insensitive and nasty to the point of disbelief, but de Courcy creates an understandably wounded modern teenager who knows how to use language as a weapon. She often provides needed humor for the play, allowing it to bend but never break. Smith ensures that Elder Thomas, a contemporary Ishmael, never feels like plot contrivance, shading in youthful confusion and naïveté instead of caricaturing it. Beck and Lawrence, too, show complicated connections to Charlie. These are all real people, suffering but surviving, and finding their own ways to have questions answered.

And then there’s Hensley, a force of astonishing physical and emotional bravery that, well, grounds the play at every well-constructed turn. Earning, never courting sympathy, the sight of Charlie reminds of something that this character, himself an English grad student, has always known: that everyone, regardless of appearance or (mis)fortune or decisions, has a story worth being told.

The Whale

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, (212) 564-1235. www.playwrightshorizons.org. Through Dec. 2.

Photo courtesy Joan Marcus.

Dan LeFranc has constructed the play of a lifetime

By Doug Strassler

“Auntie Mame” would fit right in with the family depicted in playwright Dan LeFranc’s The Big Meal. Her “life is a banquet” sensibility echoes throughout the show, running at Playwrights Horizons after a decorated turn in Chicago last year, in which events unfold over generations in the life of an “every family” at a series of restaurants. Even without Auntie Mame in tow, however, there is plenty on which to feast: Big Meal boasts one of the greatest ensembles to unite on the New York stage this year.

LeFranc’s conceit is for multiple actors to chart the growth of multiple family members. So when twenty something Sam starts dating carefree waitress Nicole, they’re played by Cameron Scoggins and Phoebe Strole, respectively. And as their relationship becomes more serious, they evolve into performers David Wilson Barnes and Jennifer Mudge, with solid younger actors Griffin Birney and Rachel Resheff  playing their children and Tom Bloom and Anita Gillette, Sam’s parents. Eventually, Scoggins and Strole play these children at an older age, and as the characters evolve into adulthood, they will morph into Barnes’ and Mudge’s carefully calibrated form. LeFranc marks the passage of time by presenting milestones in the show’s restaurant settings – marriages, affairs, childbirth, and, most pivotally, death, marked by the arrival of a waitress (a mute but communicative Molly Ward) arriving with a last meal.

This style, directly inspired by A. R. Gurney’s The Dining Room and Thornton Wilder’s The Long Christmas Dinner, has the same effect of a slasher movie. The audience watches, knowing that inevitably, another character’s death looms at some point with the arrival of the waitress – i.e., the grim reaper. And like real life, we don’t know when or how (or even for whom) death will come, so it’s up to us to relish what happens in between. Yes, in taking a cue from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, this family lives in the Big Moments, but LeFranc leaves it up to the audience to stencil in all the imaginary universalities that exist in between.

It helps tremendously to have New York theater anchor Sam Gold, whose prolific resume is bested only by his rapt interest in how people connect to one another, in the director’s seat. Gold’s  invisible hand illuminates every aspect of LeFranc’s heartfelt work, elevating it beyond a device. Hurtling through time with the flourish of a David Ives play, Gold is able to build suspense and provide humor and emotional resonance; Meal is clipped and then slow in all the right places. Even seemingly pedestrian rites of passage feel fresh and moving. His cast does terrifically specific work in each of their roles as the growing members of the family, particularly as Bloom distinguishes Sam’s crass father with Nicole’s gentler one and Barnes, who bounds terrifically from cavalier young father to calcified older one. Gillette, too, is heartbreaking. It’s to everyone’s credit that a tongue-in-cheek line like “You look just like your mother” will elicit both a chuckle and a teardrop.

There are few journeys like the rich one taken by the family in Meal, one of the most affecting works of any entertainment to be found this season. Mame Dennis would be so exited – there isn’t a sucker in the bunch.

The Big Meal

Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, between 9th & 10th Avenues. http://www.playwrightshorizons.org/sharp.asp

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