It’s impossible to escape the irony that a 50-year-old man in the midst of a divorce, working as a camera repairman, limping around on an almost-lame hip lives in apartment complex called Linda Vista. Beautiful view? From where we sit, everything about Wheeler (Ian Barford)—the antihero of Tracy Letts’ latest dark comedy, Linda Vista—is pretty repellent.
This is a guy whose idea of foreplay is a three-hour Stanley Kubrick costume drama (Barry Lyndon, in case you’re considering trying this at home). He loathes anything coming out of Hollywood and “the fanboys who support and demand this shit.” (“I can’t name any American movies I like that came out after about 1984,” he sniffs.) He hates Elvis, Queen, and essentially anything you’d call popular music. His blind date, a sunny life coach named Jules (Cora Vander Broek), dares to ask his opinion on Radiohead: “Until they came along, I’d forgotten music could be so joyless.” (Needless to say, Wheeler did not approve of her karaoke selection, Lisa Loeb’s lovelorn Reality Bites anthem, “Stay.”) And don’t get him started on Trump voters: “The problem with these racist cocksuckers isn’t that they’re doing too much OxyContin, it’s that they need to do a whole lot more.” Okay, we’ll give him that last one.
[Read Steven Suskin’s ★★★★★ review here.]
As central characters go, Wheeler is, admittedly, supremely unlikable. He’s also a staggeringly realistic creation. A foreign-film obsessed guy in a dead-end job who bags better women than he deserves? Been there, done him.
Your tolerance for Wheeler and his escapades—his eons-ago girlfriend–turned–old friend Margaret (Sally Murphy), calls it his “shtick”—will likely depend on if you’ve ever tolerated your own Wheeler. (There’s one dialogue exchange, about a dozen lines or so, between Wheeler and Jules, that I have actually had. Word for word.) Margaret is also the only person who calls him out: “Your shtick is old and tired.” Though one of Wheeler’s coworkers gives it to him pretty straight as well: “You’re a mess,” says Anita (Caroline Neff) unpityingly after he makes a fumbling pass at her.
I’m still trying to puzzle out why there are three people—Wheeler, Anita, and the pervy Michael (Troy West), who has clearly spent an unhealthy amount of time contemplating suicide by cheese grater (“Step on it and flatten it…sharply draw that serrated edge across my carotid artery…you could bleed out in three minutes”)—working in a camera shop. Are that many people in Southern California suddenly trading their iPhones for actual cameras?
Barford—who you might remember as the emotionally inert Little Charles in Letts’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning August: Osage County (which also featured Murphy and West)—makes Wheeler a charmer when he needs to, but he’s even better when he goes to the character’s dark side. Wheeler’s casual cruelty toward Jules and his inexplicable coupling with the 20-something Minnie (Chantal Thuy) are so painful to watch they actually induce audible gasps.
Usually a messed-up central character takes some sort of journey toward redemption in a play; he gets better. But in this case, Wheeler acknowledges he’s a wreck and actually gets worse as time goes on. (Act 2 Wheeler, fair warning, is a real A-hole.) But actually…staggeringly realistic.
Linda Vista opened Oct. 10, 2019, and runs through Nov. 10 at the Hayes Theater. Tickets and information: 2st.com
