Winking Back the Tears

Consider Go Back to Where You Are, the weird and wonderful sliver of a play from David
Greenspan, an early end-of-season palate cleanser. Though Greenspan has a great
deal more on his mind than just a send-up of every theatrical excess that is
indulged in over the course of a Broadway season, director Leigh Silverman and
the cast go to great lengths to send up the theatrical milieu in which
Greenspan has centered his play.

Set mostly on the Long Island estate of self-dramatizing
actress Claire, Go Back To Where You Are
gently satirizes every archetypal theater professional, from Claire’s
journeyman actress friend Charlotte, desperate for work other than the regional
revival of Annie that looms on her calendar, to personal and professional
partners Tom (Stephen Bogardus) and Malcolm (Tim Hopper), a director and set
designer, respectively. They’ve all gathered at Claire’s home, along with her
playwright brother, Bernard, and her son, unhappy TV writer Wally (Michael
Izquierdo), to celebrate the birthday of Claire’s daughter Carolyn, who never
appears.

Into this tense gathering is thrown a time-traveling demon
named Passalus, formerly a chorus boy in ancient Greece, who has been sent by
God on a mission to help the off-stage Carolyn. His reward will be the total
annihilation that Passalus yearns for, but only if he can refrain from
interfering in the lives of everyone else. That he can’t could have been just
the playwright’s prerogative, except that Silverman has emphasized the bruised
humanity of Greenspan’s characters to such a heightened degree that no demon
could remain unmoved by, say, Charlotte’s unhappy entombment in Claire’s
shadow.

Silverman occasionally allows Greenspan’s meta script—which
simultaneously mocks the tropes of meta scripts while filled with asides to the
audience—to turn saggy, and the proceedings would benefit from a tighter
delineation between breaking the fourth wall and continuing an on stage
conversation. But with actors like Lisa Banes as Claire (the kind of actress
who responds to a compliment by dropping her voice and saying, “People have
been so kind”) and Mariann Mayberry, herself a mainly Chicago-based actress, as
Claire, Greenspan’s sympathy for the men and women who toil in the theater is
thrown into the spotlight.

Greenspan himself plays Passalus, with his usual sui generis
flair, while Brian Hutchison plays his stand-in, the awkward and endearing Bernard,
who writes plays described by Tom as like “strange little objects.” And for
this gnomic, cheerfully heartbreaking valentine to the theater and art—and to
the work that goes into it—there could be no better description.

Go Back to Where You Are, through May 1, Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd St. (betw.
9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $70.