Let’s first explain the meaningful title for Nantucket Sleigh Ride, a rambling and rambunctious new comedy by John Guare.
The term comes from way back in the 19th century when Nantucket, that picturesque island some 30 miles east of Massachusetts, was a hub of the whaling industry: After sailors harpooned a whale, the huge creature would madly swim across the waves, dragging their sleigh-like longboat in its wake for miles until it died or swamped everybody.
Today, this archaic phrase is synonymous with a wild-goose chase or a snipe hunt, in that it characterizes a giddy, perhaps even pointless, adventure. Living up to its title all too well, the bumpy journey that is Nantucket Sleigh Ride indeed turns out to be quite a screwy time at the Mitzi E. Newhouse space, where Lincoln Center Theater’s production opened on Monday.
A former playwright turned business executive, Mundy (John Larroquette) is an affable gent in his middle 60s. When people from his past unexpectedly materialize, Mundy flashes back some 35 years to the summer of 1975, when he purchased, sight unseen, a house in Nantucket from the proceeds of Internal Structure of Stars, a hit play drawn from his childhood memories.
Suffering from writer’s block, Mundy lands in Nantucket and who he encounters and what happens to him over the next 24 hours or so swirl into a comical nightmare. These surreal doings involve a possibly delusional Vietnam veteran (Will Swenson), a probably sociopathic child psychologist (Douglas Sills), Mundy’s wildly contrasting mistresses (both played by Tina Benko), an emotionally frail heiress (Clea Alsip), and her two needy children (Adam Chanler-Berat and Grace Rex), among others.
Wandering in and out of the improbable action is the elegant figure of Jorge Luis Borges (Germán Jaramillo), the Argentine father of magic realism, who drops the occasional aphorism and helps Mundy scribble overnight a great play, which ultimately proves to be metafictional. A running gag throughout the story is that nearly all of the characters, including Mundy’s present-day secretary (Stacey Sargeant), have acted in productions of Internal Structure of Stars, and when they meet the playwright, every one of them immediately begins proclaiming snatches of its dialogue.
A fitfully entertaining two-act caper, the essential and disappointing problem with Nantucket Sleigh Ride is that its antic story does not rise to a higher power: There is no significance to it, no raison d’être, no message to take away afterwards to mull over. It is merely an elaborate shaggy dog tale/tail that wags away like crazy and then ends.
Perhaps a lesser playwright can get away with presenting such nonsense, but Guare is a true American master whose best works include Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves, and A Few Stout Individuals, along with plenty of other distinctive plays, and richer substance is expected to flow from his pen.
That said, the smooth excellence of LCT’s production makes this relatively frivolous comedy eminently watchable. Abetted by designer David Gallo’s fluent settings and Howell Binkley’s lighting, director Jerry Zaks’ quick, sharp staging brings a sense of coherence to Guare’s disorderly text.
An ever-avuncular presence, John Larroquette invests Mundy with some befuddled charm. Dressed in character-defining clothes by Emily Rebholz, a sterling ensemble lends credence to the mostly incredible people they portray. Douglas Sills is especially vivid in his several contrasting roles, particularly so when he hilariously materializes directly out of the cryogenic icebox as a frost-encrusted Walt Disney on a divine mission to—well, let’s not give away that point.
To find out just what Uncle Walt is up to, among similarly bizarre doings, hop aboard this Nantucket Sleigh Ride for a wild trip through the magic realism kingdom that John Guare amusingly maps out.
