Who said Broadway comedy was dead?
Tracy Letts, well known in these parts for his Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County and as a Tony Award-winning actor (in plays including the 2012 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), is back at his keyboard, and the results are superb. While his past oeuvre has not been noted for laughs—this is the man who wrote Killer Joe and Bug, after all—time and tide have caught up with the playwright, who battles his own fifty-year mark with wild comic lances thrust at life’s annoyances, only to have these darts more or less boomerang. The results are knowing, prickly, and altogether hilarious.
Wheeler (Ian Barford) is a mess of a loser, as he’d be the first to tell you. Divorced, estranged, crotchety, and stuck in a low-grade job as a camera repairman in a near-obsolete shop with no apparent customers, he is—to quote one of the four women in his life—“a turtle who doesn’t know he’s lost his shell.” A cranky Everyman, a hero who will battle to get in the last word while tottering around his overactive bedroom wrapped in a bedsheet.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★ review here.]
Wheeler—his first name is Dick, “which is why I go by Wheeler,” he explains—has just moved into a two-bedroom condo in the Linda Vista neighborhood of San Diego, with a communal pool and a view of the ocean if you stand up tall and “look to the right of the silver building.” Long-time friends Paul (Jim True-Frost) and Margaret (Sally Murphy)—the latter a former girlfriend of Wheeler, still battling it out with him 25 years later—set him up on a date with a life coach named Jules Isch (Cora Vander Broeck). There’s a Jules-ish joke in there, of course, it’s that kind of play.
Our hero’s life is further complicated by the presence of Minnie (Chantal Tuy), a tattooed, battered and pregnant “20-year-old Vietnamese rockabilly girl” who lives in the complex, and, at the shop, the loquaciously vulgar owner Michael (Troy West)—sort of an alternate version of Wheeler, one who still lives with Mother—and the friendly but just-holding-it-together clerk Anita (Caroline Neff). Plus Wheeler’s unseen but frequently discussed wife and teenager.
The whole is consistently well played under the helm of Chicago-based director of Dexter Bullard. While this is a coproduction between Second Stage and Center Theater Group of Los Angeles, it is billed as “Steppenwolf’s Production” and therein lies a significant part of the success of Linda Vista. The play was commissioned by and premiered at Steppenwolf, Letts’ home base, in April 2017; the entire team, with the exception of two cast members, appears to be intact. Also very much in evidence is Steppenwolf designer Todd Rosenthal, who won a Tony and an Olivier for August: Osage County. Rosenthal’s set makes grand use of a turntable, with the actors literally running through the rooms (to get to the bedroom) while the table ever-so-swiftly turns against them.
The actors are little known in New York other than Barford (the father in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, “Little Charlie” in August: Osage County) and Murphy (another Osage County original, well-remembered as Julie Jordan in the 1994 Lincoln Center Carousel). All are quite marvelous, with three of the cast pulling off explicit (and explicitly hysterical) sex scenes. Barford is especially wonderful in an award-worthy turn as the hapless hero who one suspects is a self-portrait of the author not-so-much in disguise.
What makes Linda Vista so very special, though, is the writing. That might sound like an obvious statement, but we have several acclaimed productions on Broadway just now in which staging and scenery predominate over what the writer(s) actually wrote. The dialogue is razor sharp and positively laced with laughter—the kind of laughter that comes not merely from “funny” lines but innocent lines that are funny in context. I don’t know if there’s a bigger laugh on Broadway right now, The Book of Mormon aside, than Lett’s line, “You don’t understand!!” Not funny on the page, you’ve got to be there.
On more than one occasion I pondered that this is very much like a Neil Simon play, albeit one written for today. (There is also in evidence at least a bit of the exasperatingly nonconformist philosophy of the dropout-from-life Murray Burns in Herb Gardner’s incomparable comedy, A Thousand Clowns.) Letts displays the Simonian knack of stoking the dialogue with aside-like lines that are cascadingly funny but very much suited to character and scene.
Simon, in fact, made several attempts at writing a similar play in which the hapless hero was something of a stand-in for the playwright (Chapter Two, Jake’s Women, Last of the Red Hot Lovers). He was never quite able to pull it off, as the late “Doc” was happy to poke fun at himself but uncomfortable when prodding too deep. Letts—who does seem to have created something of a self-portrait here—is uncompromising in giving us not just the laughter, but the pain; and as a highly accomplished actor himself, he is very much aware of how to effectively translate this to the stage.
Which is, in part, why Linda Vista is such a strong, warmly human and emotionally satisfying comedy of crotchety manners. Altogether lovely, when you stop to wipe your tears from all those howls of laughter.
Linda Vista opened October 10, 2019 at the Helen Hayes Theater and runs through November 10. Tickets and information: 2st.com
