Some 30-odd years since witnessing Aunt Dan and Lemon, I still vividly recall how its characters gradually became repulsive to me. I felt like ripping up my seat and throwing it at the stage. Then I realized, however, that Wallace Shawn, the playwright, wanted the audience to abhor these initially attractive people who slowly reveal themselves to be amoral Nazi apologists.
A far less violent but similar feeling of dislike grew upon me while watching Sunday, a new play that premiered on Monday at the Atlantic Theater Company. But I wonder whether Jack Thorne, the playwright, intends viewers to despise the youthful characters who strut and fret through his triste play.
Best known here as the author of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the libretto for King Kong, Thorne sets his present-day Sunday in a modest apartment in New York City where a small group of individuals has assembled for an informal book club session. In their early twenties, they are educated people both white and of color, and it’s apparent that their literary discussion—in this case regarding a novel by Anne Tyler—is mostly an excuse to hang out and party.
[Read Elysa Gardner’s ★★ review here.]
The playwright presents little in the way of story. Sunday offers mostly an assemblage of character sketches annotated by one among the group, who in a rather sour epilogue relates how everybody’s lives finally turn out far in the future.
There is Milo (Zane Pais), a trust fund charmer who gets obnoxious with liquor and cocaine; his semi-girlfriend Jill (Juliana Canfield), a nice, acquiescent soul who co-hosts the evening; his best bud Keith (Christian Strange), a low-keyed black guy who succeeded at white Ivy schools by being invisible; and his oldest friend since childhood Alice (Ruby Frankel), a snarky would-be writer who narrates the proceedings. Marie (Sadie Scott) is Jill’s roommate, a wan, rather timid loser who knows the others only slightly. Then there is Bill (Maurice Jones), the downstairs neighbor, a socially awkward guy perhaps a dozen years older than this Generation Z crowd.
“We’re wry and ironic and dull,” remarks Alice. “Worse than that, we’re insignificant.”
They’re self-absorbed, too. So the evening drifts along, as does the play for some 90 dreary minutes, its several passages of time marked by sudden breaks of stylized dancing. After everyone but Marie leaves, the absent Bill comes upstairs and the two misfits share a mostly sympathetic conversation and some smooching that ends inconclusively. (By this point, I was hoping for a murder, but no.)
Everything happens—or rather, doesn’t happen—in designer Brett J. Banakis’ sparely furnished and abstract setting for the apartment. The space is dominated by a huge pile of books over which the characters variously climb and occasionally strike poses.
Other than depicting an utterly clueless generation, Sunday offers a rather pointless visit with some unlikeable individuals you’d probably never care to meet. Lee Sunday Evans, the director, obtains solid performances from the actors, who at least give the flat-liner drama some semblance of real life. The omniscient character of Alice points out the “defining moment” of various characters, although how they precisely define these people escapes me. Mostly the show makes me wish I had stayed home with a good book.
Sunday opened September 23, 2019, at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through October 13. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
