Photo by Hunter Canning

I’m not sure who has it worse in Trevor, the latest Lesser America comedy to nestle into downtown’s Theater for the New City: is it Morgan Fairchild, that B-list sex kitten of yesteryear, or Trevor, the animalistic former child star whose quest to be rediscovered drives the play?

It’s neither fair nor even accurate to describe Trevor as “animalistic,” really, as the central character in Nick Jones’ clever, subversive comedy is indeed, an animal. He’s a chimp, not a man, despite his resemblance to Steven Boyer, the terrifically malleable actor (as anyone who has seen him in such works as Hand to God and The Ugly One can attest) playing him for both laughs and pathos. I haven’t just spoiled anything, either. One learns early on about Trevor’s true nature. And Jones is right in providing such a disclosure upfront, as there are plenty of other gifts to be found in Trevor, lovingly nourished by director Moritz von Stuelpnagel.

It’s likely that most actors will relate to Trevor, as the struggle for work isn’t limited to any particular series or phylum. When he was younger, Trevor was a successful animal performer, traveling the live appearance circuit and starring in popular commercials, as well as a TV sitcom alongside Ms. Fairchild. But like with so many child stars, the aging process hasn’t been easy on Trevor, who lives at home with his “mother,” Sandra (Colleen Werthman) and stews in the memory of what he used to be, even as fellow chimp actor Oliver (an on-the-beat Nathaniel Kent) continues to prosper. Poor Trevor wants to work and be adulated once more, but alas, hardly anyone comes calling for the simian.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that Trevor is, you know, an animal. This is starting to cause trouble in the neighborhood. His neighbor Ashley (a wonderfully frustrated Amy Staats), a new mother, objects to the fact that Trevor drove himself to a local Dunkin’ Donuts to apply for a job. Sandra is rendered relatively ineffective as both manager and caregiver. She occasionally puts Trevor in a cage, though Ashley argues that he should spend all of his time there, as he is an unpredictable threat – and some of Trevor’s instinctive responses to situations, as employed by an indefatigable Boyer, support her argument. But then again, Trevor can often function like an independent adult.

Jones’ script sounds silly, but as with all productions from Lesser America, still a very young company, Trevor gets a layered production, buoyed by complex scenarios and a completely committed cast. Trevor has life dreams, but is hampered by himself and by others. Sandra wants the best for him, and is sometimes blinded by her confused love (Werthman, like Boyer, never condescends to cartoonish acting and instead creates real empathy). No one can effectively reach each other – Trevor even fails to recognize an Animal Control employee, mistakenly identifying him, Norma Desmond-style, as a TV producer. Stuelpnagel is a perfect match for Jones’ voice, which sometimes plants tongue in cheek but still finds a way to home in on universal concerns.  A streamlined show, Trevor toes the line between mordant humor and self-seriousness with aplomb. Sometimes it takes a chimp to shed real light on human nature.

Trevor

Theater for the New City. www.theaterforthenewcity.net. Thru March 17.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Of all the many hard-hitting statements made by Martin Moran in All the Rage, the life-affirming one-man show authored by and starring the performer and which opened last night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, one statement stood out among his descriptions of those who have somehow been victimized or found themselves on the downside advantage. At one point, the engaging performer mentions that he is over fifty years old. And I was struck. Though it has no big set changes or intricately choreographed scenes, Rage is indeed a rigorous workout, and Moran guides his audience through the show with ease and a calming conviction that requires a kind of inner energy that not even most marathon runners half his age possess.

Not that Rage feels long – in fact, Moran’s reflective biography flies by as directed by Seth Barrish. It’s as riveting as was his first one-man show, The Tricky Part, also directed by Barrish.  Rage is not a sequel but in many ways an emotional catch-up piece to that 2004 Obie-winning work. That first show addressed the effects endured by Moran as a result of sexual abuse at a young age. Moran doesn’t avoid discussing those elements of his past, but he applies the lessons learned from his experience (and subsequent therapy) to other areas, both mentally and geographically. Moran’s current tale finds him facing a miserable stepmother in Las Vegas, a hermetic brother in the Denver of his youth, and even to South Africa. If it sounds like this show might be all over the place, fear not: the masterful Moran is very much in control at all times of his coherent show.

Barrish has staged Moran as though his audience were students in a classroom or (perhaps self-help?) lecture being taught by Moran. Set designer Mark Wendland has fashioned a desk, globe, blackboard, map, and overhead projector for the performer to use as tools illustrating his whereabouts for his stories. There all also lamps near these aides. In a noticeable but undistracting touch, Moran keeps turning off each lamp the second he is ready to move on from a specific anecdote. While this certainly cuts down on heat – and perhaps onstage electric bills – it also adds to the comforting feel of the show. (Russell H. Champa also designs effective lighting that cannot be operated onstage.) Despite the probing nature of Rage, Moran is like a post-modern Mr. Rogers. He may be taking us along scary terrain, but we are always assured that we will remain safe.

As Moran explains, his journey begins after a nasty confrontation with his stepmother at the funeral of his father sends him on a quest for greater purpose. He hilariously recounts how feeling a little empty weighed on him while performing on Broadway in Monty Python’s Spamalot and eventually led him to volunteer as a French-to-English translator for Siba, a refugee from Chad. Siba, who has undergone torture by guerillas and been separated from his family, knows of a kind of pain that pierces even deeper, some might argue, than Moran’s has. Moran relays the many lessons that Siba teaches him about acceptance and forgiveness, and how he applies those lessons in his own life, often with surprising results. Barrish lets his performer stroll out to sea without getting caught in any undertow; none of Moran’s tangents are actually that. What they are are chapters in the story of Moran’s continuing search for personal growth and self-actualization. And what they also are, more often than not, are quite hysterical.

What Rage also is, contrary to title, is a very measured show. Moran is wholly involving. He is generous with personal information without being self-aggrandizing. And he knows how not to cross the line into territory that might feel too personally threatening to his audience.  In All the Rage, Moran hits on universal feelings of loss, loneliness, confusion and anger. But his story remains, intoxicatingly, very much his own.

All the Rage

Peter Jay Sharp Theater, 416 West 42nd Street, www.ticketcentral.com. Through Feb. 24.

Photo by Joan Marcus

Fans of women-in-prison flicks should take note: Rob Ashford’s latest Broadway revival of the seminal Tennessee Williams work Cat on a Hot Tin Roof conjures up a woman who’s all boxed in.

The inmate in question is the inimitable Maggie Pollitt, better known as Maggie the Cat, the wantonly desperate woman conniving to reclaim the sexual spark and family fortune which first drew her to the tormented Brick, a fallen football star besotted by booze and ghosts from the past, as well as a few spirits who can only be found in bottle form. But beyond designer Christopher Oram’s cavernously cage-like bedroom set, there are other forces limiting the rich storytelling potential of these two long-suffering Southerners. Those would be their portrayers, Scarlett Johansson and Benjamin Walker, who, despite earnest intentions, wobble through their portrayals as would a drunk driver who’s just been pulled over and forced to do a sobriety test.

Unfortunately, Ashford makes for a lesser policeman when it comes to this Williams show, admittedly a protracted work but one that revels in its depiction of loneliness and liars. Williams’ entire first act is devoted to Maggie’s machinations to get a rise out of her husband – interpret that every which way you will – who seems more than a little attached to his late friend, Skipper. His language is rich and poetic, and requires a performer who can imbue his cadences with melodic cunning. Johansson, struggling with both her voice and her inconsistently calibrated Southern accent, cannot fit that bill. The actress, long a Maxim magazine favorite, has always been a Hollywood sex object, which makes her an understandable casting choice for a commercial run. But her sultriness has largely been a calculated marketing move rather than the organic result of on-screen sensuality, and in a role like Maggie, where she needs it the most, she falls flat. Cats, as the play declares, may land uninjured, but this one certainly does damage to her point of impact. Her scenes, saddled with a breathy and forced delivery, feel redundant and circular when they should begin to allow her claws to emerge. From the outset, her Maggie is so strong one wonders if she even needs a husband. There is no desperation to her – lines that should be beseeching become a mere lecture. And later scenes, as she plays a subtle bargaining game for dying Big Daddy’s money against her in-laws Gooper and Mae (a quite convincing Emily Bergl and Michael Park), lack the needed emotional leverage.

And what about those scenes with Big Daddy (Ciarán Hinds)? Ashford brings an inappropriate amount of tragedy at the notion of a family who will lie to the terminally ill paterfamilias to spare his feelings. This Cat fails to make the point of how lies can destroy more than they protect. While Debra Monk’s Big Mama is a proper blend of comic relief and period window dressing, Hinds is over-the-top, out of period, and oddly stylized in a goatee and with slicked-back hair. He’s so full of bombast that he never opens a window into Big Daddy’s hidden vulnerability.

And yet any production of Cat can be saved with a strong enough Brick – and yet Walker struggles to wrestle all of Brick’s conflicting emotions to the ground. Though the character must repress a litany of emotions – he’s a suicidal closet case – he still must telegraph his character’s yearning and frustrations. This Brick is oddly cold, lacking chemistry with both Hinds and Johansson. As with the character of Hal in the also recently-revived ‘50s relic Picnic, Ashford fetishizes Walker’s chiseled body. Before the actor even emerges from the Pollitt bathroom, steam pours in from offstage. That’s a cheap trick and a telltale sign of weakness in Cat. Its leading man and woman must first be capable of generating their own heat.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Richard Rodgers Theater, 226 West 46th Street. http://www.catonahottinroofbroadway.com/.  Through March 30.

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/.

Photo by Joan Marcus

We’ve all met people like Juliana Smithton, the prickly pharmaceutical researcher played with astonishing nuance by the inimitable Laurie Metcalf in Sharr White’s The Other Place. Accomplished, curt, sensible, Juliana is all business and no empathy, the kind of woman we have either worked for, sat next to, or dealt with in some confrontational manner. The kind of woman who, you’re likely to guess, harbors some deep-seated secret loss or disappointment that would make you feel sorry for her if she weren’t so busy making your life miserable.

White doesn’t pity Juliana, but he does examine this scientist from all sides in Place. This taut, splintered play, astutely directed by Joe Mantello first at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in 2011 and now playing at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, isn’t so much a mystery as it is a kaleidoscopic examination at what’s eating Juliana. We first meet her, quite sensibly clad in a sleek blacks jacket and skirt (David Zinn is the costume designer), shilling a new dementia drug at a conference in St. Thomas. Narrating to us, the real audience, as curtly as she does her fictional one, Juliana explains that the presence of a young woman in a yellow bikini has distracted her. She tells us that she ended her lecture early and, upon returning home to the Boston area, sought treatment for what she suspects is brain cancer, of which she has a family history.

But Place is not an issue play, nor is it a mawkish look at illness. There isn’t room for it between White’s strategic assembly of non-linear scenes, getting us into Juliana’s head, and the unimpeachable way in which Metcalf connects all the dots. Most of these pertain to the people in her life, and how she perceives them. That includes her husband, esteemed oncologist Ian (Daniel Stern), from whom she may or may not be estranged because he may or may not be cheating on her. That also includes her daughter, Laurel (Zoe Perry, who also fills out several other female roles), whom she believes to have run off at a young age with her medical research postdoc, Richard (John Schiappa).

Though Juliana’s condition, it would seem, degenerates, Place has only improved since its Off-Broadway bow two seasons ago. Initially seen just as a vehicle for its leading lady, always rock-solid in the role, White has refined the play into a more mature work, confined neither by genre expectations nor formula developments. It is also less clumsy. While an occasional plot question mark remains, what felt omitted before now feels largely inferred. White trusts his audience and doesn’t spoon feed them answers. The results are universal, and emotionally potent, strengthened by Mantello’s polished production. Eugene Lee and Edward Pierce’s set design, evoking both modern window design and entwined DNA helixes, is stark but fitting; Fitz Patton’s music and sound design punctuates the many revolutions Juliana’s world makes.

And Metcalf’s contributions here cannot be underestimated. Juliana is a give-and-take role; the character keeps secrets from herself as well as the audience in whom she appears to confide. And yet the actress, eschewing sympathy at almost every turn, shades in all of Juliana’s pain, regret and fear. While she commands the stage alone often – and never leaves it for the show’s duration – Metcalf is also on fire opposite her co-stars, particularly a subtly moving Stern, hardened and heartbroken by Juliana’s helpless abuse, and Perry. It’s worth noting that Perry is Metcalf’s real-life daughter not to denote any act of nepotism or shout out a marketing ploy, but to explain what might inform their work together, especially a touching scene that comes near the play’s end. Solo or not, though, Place marks another tour-de-force for Metcalf. There’s no scientific explanation for what she is capable of. You have to see it to believe it.

And you will believe.

The Other Place

Samuel J. Friedman Theater, 261 West 47th Street. www.mtc-nyc.org. Through Feb. 24.

• 

  Scarlett Johansson appears in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at the Richard Rogers Theater

  Though she won a Tony, I was not a big fan of Scarlett Johansson in Arthur Miller’s View From the Bridge. Can she redeem herself in another revival, Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?

• Bobby Cannavale has a few more weeks left in Glengarry Glen Ross. But fear not: He will be back later this spring in a revival of Clifford Odets’ The Big Knife.

• Tom Hanks makes his Broadway debut as real-life journalist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy—the last project worked on by Nora Ephron.

• Matilda, a musical adaptation of the Roald Dahl book, swept the Oliviers in London last year. Can it be as big a hit stateside?

• Laurie Metcalf is one of the greatest actresses of her generation, but despite three Emmys, is often overlooked. Perhaps her performance as a scientist battling mental illness in The Other Place can put a stop to that.

Read our predictions on literature, Broadway, politics and fashion.

Many are familiar with Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, one of the most cutting seminal works of modern theatre. It has been a mainstay of dramatic study since it debuted, with many a performer cutting his or teeth on the playwright’s sharply-fanged roles, some to better success than others. But the current Woolf revival, imported from Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and directed by Pam MacKinnon, does just what the term implies, breathing new life and insight into this warhorse of a play.

Much of the credit goes to the quartet bringing these storied characters to life: Carrie Coon and Madison Dirks are perfectly matched as Honey and Nick, while Tracy Letts’ George turns the tables on Amy Morton’s Martha as we’ve never seen it before. It’s a reversal that sheds new light on the relationship between these warriors of words. But Martha gives as good as she gets, and Morton’s performance adds credibility to the character in ways never before seen. Her Martha likes entertaining, and loves holding court over new people. A Woolf production has never made it clearer as to just why Nick and Honey don’t just go home from the party that precedes the play’s action and instead enter George and Martha’s den of depravity – or why they find it so hard to leave.

“We had a lot of discussions about why they haven’t left,” Morton explained. “It always kept us from getting too insane. They have their reasons for staying, partly having to do with who [Martha’s] father is. Nick’s ambition is there, but George and Martha also keep these people in the room. Their fighting is too interesting for them to leave.”

And how. Morton acknowledges, like everyone, a familiarity with the both the role of Martha and the play itself. “I saw the movie on TV when I was a kid, maybe ten or eleven, watching it with my dad,” she recalls. “I was really enthralled and really confused. I thought, ‘Why are these grownups so mad at each other?’”

Subsequent study of the play, however, brought greater enlightenment Morton’s way. “I think she is incredibly sad and smart and witty, probably just a riot to be around,” she says. And she understands why a seething Martha has gone to seed. “I think her spirit in her early years was very intuitive, very gutsy, very earthy. If she was around today, she would be at the top of some career. But that wasn’t what women did back then for the most part.

“That’s the frustration of her life,” Morton continues. “She’s living life through her husband, and her ambition was large but his was not. That’s where a lot of her pain comes from, her thwarted ambition. If you can’t have kids or a career, Jesus!”

But a lot of the reason why this production shines – and it is scintillating – is the interplay between longtime friends and colleagues Letts and Morton. The two Chicago-based performers may be best known for their collaboration on the mammothly successful awards baiter August: Osage County – he wrote and had a featured role, she took on perhaps the show’s most demanding leading role – but they go way back. “Tracy and I have worked together for so long, I think this is the fifth or sixth time we’ve been married,” Morton jokes. “We’re so familiar with each other, which helped us make sure the baseline in this play was of a relationship about love. This is a couple who, underneath it all, all the vitriol, love each other very deeply.”

Morton and Letts’ understanding of the show – which Morton describes as “seriously deep writing” – comes from a long time of attachment to the play. Morton herself directed it nearly a decade ago at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, and the production ran at Steppenwolf and Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage. Playwright Albee came to Chicago during the rehearsal phase.

“He talked about the play,” she says, “which was illuminating, it was great. He watched some scenes and had some discussions with Pam. Some were more dramaturgical, and some were ‘This is how I see George and Martha.’”

And what was it like running the show in front of its creator? “Absolutely intimidating,” she acknowledges. “I don’t know anyone who would say he watched us and were perfectly fine; you’d need nerves of steel. But it was also very exciting.”

Morton confirms that the role of Martha is definitely a workout. “I don’t do much during the day because I am constantly conserving energy. I kind of lay low, I sleep a lot, I eat a lot, I basically live like a monk.”  And she acknowledges being homesick for Chicago while Woolf continues its open-ended Broadway run. “I miss my house and my friends and my family,” she admits, which includes her husband Rob Milburn, who did sound design for Woolf but spends most of his time in Chicago. “I’m sequestered by the show. But I am also really busy and I love New York and I have friends here. And I treat myself on Sundays with a great massage and go someplace fabulous for dinner. I’m always asking people ‘Where should I go?’”

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is running at the Booth theatre. More information can be found at virginiawoolfbroadway.com.

Broadway’s newest drama, The Anarchist, proves that David Mamet has not just become a conservative; he’s become a poet. Taking as his inspiration the 1981 Brinks incident where subversives from the Weatherman Underground were convicted for killing a Nyack, N.J., policeman, Mamet examines the motives of political radicals and the principles of social guardians. His antagonists are Cathy (Patti Lupone), who is awaiting parole after serving 20 years, and Ann (Debra Winger), the parole officer charged to adjudicate the parole. Their dialogue personalizes formal academic debate.

Poetics occur when Cathy, with her cagey dismissals of the system, ardently opposes Ann’s dedication to upholding the law. The contrast between beliefs and morals is defined by the personalities of these two women: one’s cunning versus the other’s sincerity; one’s passion versus the other’s wisdom. These women also argue those same positions subliminally, within themselves. Mamet’s language is almost chaste; the profane background of a heinous political act (“called protest though it was crime”) is enough. The women’s wrenching internal argument requires plain, though fervent, discussion.

The Anarchist’s dual character study recalls the tension of Strindberg’s seminal two-person drama The Stronger. This similar battle of psychological strength becomes relevant to contemporary political polarization. Mamet’s concerned with the way American citizens—ever more divided since the turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s and the 2000 presidential election—reveal passions that fuse them. Mamet provides dialectics about politics, but above all Cathy and Ann talk about personal morality. An interesting—and probably the most sincere—aspect of Mamet’s conservatism shows in his leanings toward religious reasoning, which he often expresses with biblical and Talmudic references. It is anarchist Cathy who expresses newfound religious fervor (“the soul is the spirit of God; it unites us”), a sign of Mamet absolving a straw man to argue with himself through the depths of our polarization.

Mamet himself directs this dry drama with severe simplicity, even as the discussion circles through Judeo-Christian tenets and Marxist/democratic principles, briefly toying with intellectual and sexual seduction. He needs powerhouse actresses to hold attention, and both Lupone and Winger do. The stage veteran provides aggressive energy, and the movie star supplies reflective subtlety. This contest of acting styles is itself Strindbergian. The result can be fine and moving, as in this exchange:

Ann: I want to save you because you have a soul.
Cathy: How do you know?
Ann: Because I have a soul.

In The Anarchist, Mamet uses his art to resolve the social tensions inherited from our political history. The play shrewdly avoids polemics (the failure of playwright Tony Kushner’s Lincoln) and goes deeper. As said in Mamet’s best film, the 1999 adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s Winslow Boy, “Justice is easy. Doing right is hard.”

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

Photo by Scott Landis

Pity poor Shelley Levene, the has-been real estate salesman central to Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize-winning play about the corrosive nature of capitalism. Not only is pathetic Shelley, brought down to his knees from desperation, not too proud to beg his boss John Williamson for some more promising clients. But as portrayed by, improbably enough, Al Pacino, this shrinking violet Shelley isn’t even granted the dignity of a performer who can completely sell Mamet’s purple prose.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking the above is a misprint. Pacino has already appeared once, onscreen, in James Foley’s hyper-kinetic film adaptation of the Mamet play, released exactly two decades ago, in the powder keg part of slick salesman Ricky Roma. It’s one of the legend’s main mid-career film triumphs. Now, in a game of Broadway musical chairs (a game that can also be called “Hey! I Want A Tony!”), Bobby Cannavale has stepped into the Roma role that already earned Joe Mantegna and Liev Schreiber Tonys for their Main Stem at-bats, while Pacino moves into the Leven roles (previously played on Broadway by Robert Prosky and Alan Alda and in the Foley film by Jack Lemmon), re-teaming with director Daniel Sullivan after their awesome revival of The Merchant of Venice.

And yet despite more than six weeks of rehearsal prior to Saturday night’s opening, Pacino doesn’t seem to have found his groove as Levene, and Sullivan’s production loses its balance. Mamet’s play, awkwardly bisected into a first act that finds each of these 1983 Chicago salesmen at a local Chinese restaurant plotting for their survival in their own way and a second act in which the gang arrives at their North Side office following a burglary, offers a layered look at Levene, who must deceive himself, Willy Loman-style, into thinking he has momentarily lost his mojo only to eventually face his dire straits. From the outset in Sullivan’s production, looking convincingly dilapidated and of its period thanks to Eugene Lee, Pacino’s conciliatory delivery admits defeat. There’s no tragic fall in store for a character if we meet him at rock bottom.

Pacino bounces back a bit better in Glengarry’s second act, despite a few line stumbles, but Sullivan’s staging drains the show of its dog-eat-dog danger. If the first act feels slim, the tenser second act is robbed of nuance. Additionally, neither Pacino nor Cannavale mine Mamet’s staccato dialogue for their full dramatic effect. There is more cackle than crackle to their delivery. Impressively, Cannavale instills a consistent sense of respect in Roma for the veteran but floundering Levene, yet he is too transparently sly to be truly seductive; anyone, even duped client James Lingk (an outstanding Jeremy Shamos, as usual) could see his sleaze a mile away.

The rest of Sullivan’s cast acquits themselves far more convincingly. John C. McGinley, as gruff Dave Moss, digs into Mamet’s dialogue with the cutting delivery of a rap artist, and Richard Schiff delivers a thoughtfully tuned Broadway debut as the nebbish George Aaronow; Murphy Guyer is convincing in the minor role of investigative detective Baylen. It is David Harbour, though, who proves to be the MVP of this team as the exasperated Williamson, face flushed with the frustration of middle management. But these parts don’t all add up to a convincing enough whole. What should be a riveting look at sly foxes dancing as fast as they can only amounts to a lazy foxtrot.

Glengarry Glen Ross

Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street. www.glengarrybroadway.com Through Jan. 20.

Photo by Isaiah Tanenbaum

Much like Dexter Morgan, graphic artist Jeff Lindsay’s darkly comic creation, uses his quench for serial killing to off other killers, so, too, does Doctor X, the deranged murderer with an MD, think he is doing his own type of public service. Doctor X, played with nimble exuberance by Flux Theatre Ensemble artistic director August Schulenberg in  the best stage performance to which I have ever witnessed him commit, has made it his mission to kill happy lovebirds in their sleep, thus preventing them from knowing the pain of broken hearts.

And remarkably, despite the many craft ways in which director Kelly O’Donnell has replicated a comic book feel for the New York stage production of Hearts Like Fists, it never feels lowbrow or churlish at all. That is largely due to the seamless way in which playwright Adam Szymkowicz, one of the leading theatrical voices of his generation, intertwines themes both humorous and mature together. And it is also due to the way O’Donnell and the Flux cast and crew embrace his ideas with both deftness and heft.

Doctor X’s lone enemy seems to be a syndicate known as the Crimefighters (Becky Byers, Rachael Hip-Flores, and Aja Houston), who attempt to stop his murderous rampage with less than perfect results. But they find a new ally in Lisa (Marnie Schulenberg). Buxom, thin, beautiful, Lisa herself doesn’t know heartbreak. But that changes when she starts dating a doctor named Peter (Chinaza Uche), who tells her that while her heart is strong, his has been damaged by disappointment in the matters of love. He has designed an artificial heart, and aspires to perform the first transplant on himself. Their different experiences lead to a turbulent start. Peter wants to bolt, while Lisa is incredulous at her first taste of abandonment, and both actors chart their characters’ seriocomic situations with careful calibration. So, too, does the always terrific Susan Louise O’Connor as a nutso nurse who pines for Peter while she herself ignores the one who longs for her (I won’t disclose who that is here).

Szymkowicz provides plenty of sugar to make his complicated medicine about crooked hearts go down smoothly. His dialogue comes riddled with memorably arch lines – “You have a face like a bowl of worms,” “You’re building a wall around your candy shell; you’re afraid I might eat it!” – that aren’t just hysterical, they’re psychologically accurate. He has created a fun show that refuses to be dumbed down.

It is also a show that takes full visual advantage of its comic-book sensibilities. O‘Donnell has managed to fill the potentially limiting space of the Secret Theatre with plenty of fun stagecraft to buttress its scenes, from Will Lowry’s colorful set design to Kia Rogers’ pulsating lighting set-up to, most especially, fight director  Adam Swiderski’s  battle choreography, mixing ninja movement with more gymnastic scenes of violence that feel authentic, never pantomimed. And though Szymkowicz could trim what feels like an extended climax, O’Donnell ensures that her terrific ensemble maintains a brisk pace for Fists, one of the more riotous and satisfying theatrical productions to emerge all season long. His imagination and her vision? Now those are what I call superpowers.

Hearts Like Fists

Presented by Flux Theatre Ensemble at the Secret Theatre, 42-02 23rd St, Long Island City. Thru December 15. www.fluxtheatre.org.