Photo courtesy of Carol Rosegg.

It’s not been a good year for Manhattan Theater Club’s City Center series, which included Zoe Kazan’s dramatically anemic We Live Here and Molly Smith Metzler’s amateurish Close Up Space. If Matt Charman’s Regrets, directed by Carolyn Cantor, is the best of the bunch, it’s only because it is raising the bar from a subterranean perch.
Charman introduces us to a rundown motel near Reno through the arrival of the practically mute Caleb Farley (Ansel Elgort). He’s an 18-year-old fleeing his life, job and wife back in New York in 1954, seeking succor in the quiet cabins (designed with care by Rachel Hauck) run by the ornery Mrs. Duke (Adriane Lenox). Men come to Mrs. Duke’s to hide out for long enough to become official state residents of Nevada and quickly facilitate a divorce.
Caleb’s motley mix of neighbors includes several men at various stages of self-awareness, though all suffer from a serious case of arrested development. There’s the sympathetic Alvin Novotny (Richard Topol), a pet shop owner from Queens; impulsive Gerald Driscoll (Lucas Caleb Rooney), an ex-Army sergeant eager to dump the wife he married while in the Philippines; and Ben Clancy (Brian Hutchison), the group’s anchor. He’s stayed on at Mrs. Duke’s motel for three years since the dissolution of his marriage.
Also making periodic, if uninitiated, visits to this “dude ranch” is Chrissie (Alexis Bledel), a townie with nowhere to go and nothing to lose who prostitutes herself to bring home some extra bucks.
Charman’s labored plot kicks into gear when it’s revealed that the reticent Caleb has headed west to escape more than just an unhappy starter marriage. I won’t reveal just what secrets Caleb harbors, but Charman’s revelations don’t carry as much currency as he thinks they do. In fact, they’re probably only worth their weight in 1950s-era dollars.
If his plot feels stale, his ear for dialogue is more impressive. With the help of a dramaturge, he could probably create a more gripping work.
Cantor is able to wrangle solid performances from most of her ensemble. Lenox bucks clichés at every turn, and Driscoll and Topol offer a nice point-counterpoint as id and superego, respectively. Elgort, in his New York stage debut, underplays his part too much. I’m not sure whether it’s a deliberate choice or just due to inexperience, but he doesn’t justify enough of Caleb’s interests or stances, so when we learn his deep dark secrets, they don’t seem to fit.
Similarly, the awkward Bledel remains unbelievable throughout the show. There’s no grit or guff to her, and the actress’ mush mouth and lack of stage presence ultimately take the audience right out of the story and the play’s period setting.

As always, Hutchison does his best to compensate for his co-stars’ deficits. This sterling actor never makes a false move, embodying Charman’s seemingly irreconcilable ideals of masculinity and sensitivity. Here’s hoping that the actor gets a play worthier of his considerable talents sometime soon.

Regrets
Through April 29, NY City Center Stage I, 131 W. 55th St. 212-581-1212, www.nycitycenter.org; $80.

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

We Live Here, despite its two-hour running time, is a flimsy excuse for a play. Set over the course of one day (and a very long night), Kazan’s story is about family. Specifically, an upper-middle class white family with pretentions of scholarship and musical talent. Write what you know has never resulted in so painful an offering.

Back from Juilliard for her sister’s wedding, Dinah (Betty Gilpin, unconvincing as a 19-year-old) brings in tow her new boyfriend David (Oscar Isaac), who teaches at the school. Except she knows David from before they met at school, back when he was her now-deceased older sister’s high school boyfriend. This does not seem to strike Dinah—or Kazan—as creepy. Instead, it’s the catalyst for a melodramatic climax that finds Dinah’s soon-to-be-married sister Althea (Jessica Collins) screaming confessions into the night.

There’s a whole lot of screaming in We Live Here, which looks and feels like a Nancy Myers movie, if Myers took a sledgehammer to her carefully constructed stories and blithely wealthy characters. Althea screams at her fiancé Sandy (Jeremy Shamos, the one saving grace of the play) and her mother (Amy Irving, already screamed hoarse prior to opening night), while engaging in an icy détente with David. Should you not realize why she’s so unhappy to see David, then my apologies that you have never before read a book, watched a movie or seen a play. If, like most of the audience, you spotted the various second-act reveals in the play’s opening moments, settle in for a long, dull evening.

Kazan reveals no previously unseen talent for writing characters, crafting dialogue or even conjuring up a compelling plot. The highest stakes in We Live Here are the pending nuptials of Sandy and Althea, two characters about whom all we know is that he’s a sweetheart and she has a tendency to turn shrill. We are, however, treated to the unfortunate sight of Collins crawling on the floor of her parents’ living room, pretending to be a “naughty kitty” that Sandy will adopt and take home.

Director Sam Gold, who has given audiences some of the most beautifully nuanced shows of the past few seasons, is capable of much more than his work here would indicate. His direction is jittery, as if he was afraid that stillness would prompt recognition on the part of the audience that what they’re watching is as inorganic as a play about a suburban Massachusetts family who have conversations about hamartia (“fatal flaw,” for those who don’t know their Latin) can be. Oh, and Althea’s dead twin was named Andromeda. Don’t worry if you don’t get the reference; Kazan drives the point home with the subtlety of a hammer to the skull.

Even less subtle is her abrupt ending, which resolves nothing and aims for complexity but merely succeeds at trendy ambiguity. Moments after the family has aired their dirty laundry (more screaming), Althea and Dinah tearily embrace…and curtain. The suddenness of the ending would be more frustrating if we hadn’t been ready to leave these whiny, self-involved characters long ago. They may live there, but thankfully we’re only visiting.

We Live Here
Through Nov. 6, NY City Center, 131 W. 55th St. (betw. 6th & 7th Aves.), www.manhattantheatreclub.com; $80.