A crotchety old New Englander totters on with toothy smile and sturdy cane, crosses the cluttered stage, and practically trips on the doorstep. Does he trip or fall? A belabored running gag delineates the difference, the joke being that anybody can trip but geriatrics simply fall without tripping and you know, dramatically speaking, where that leads….
Welcome to the world of Harry Townsend’s Last Stand, a comedy by George Eastman at City Center Stage II. (While this is performed at one of Manhattan Theatre Club’s off-Broadway playhouses, it is an outside booking and decidedly not up to MTC standards.)
In comes papa’s uncomfortable, fully grown, California-real-estate-agent son on a quick visit from the Coast. After jokes about past-expiration-date crackers, Formica, and farts, prescient playgoers are faced with only two possible options. Dad will in the end shuffle off happily to Happy Acres or Pleasant Gardens or Meadow Wood, call it what you will; or, he’ll be carted from his Vermont cabin-among-the-pines in a pine box. Since Harry Townsend’s Last Stand is self-labeled as a comedy, you can guess where we, and Harry, end up.
Similar ground—complete with an oft-referred to dead wife—was handled this season in Florian Zeller’s infinitely superior The Height of the Storm. Every nuance that was provocative in that MTC production is laid out flat here in Eastman’s play, in sixties sitcom style. (Note to the producer: it is perhaps unwise to heighten the comparison by having a houseboard loaded with critic’s raves for the recently closed Height of the Storm literally adjacent to the shoulders of the Harry Townsend ticket taker.)
There is an audience for an evening full of jokes about farts and hernia trusses, stoked with past-century sex talk which wouldn’t make Neil Simon blush (or laugh, either). But that audience, methinks, is off in Happy Acres or Pleasant Gardens. Harry Townsend’s Last Stand seems geared toward Love Boat enthusiasts, wherever they might be. The present play, let it be noted, premiered in 2015 in the Palm Springs desert under the title Happy Hour, with Love Boat’s Gavin MacLeod at the helm.
The less said about the work of playwright Eastman and director Karen Carpenter, the better. Designer Lauren Halpern (of 4000 Miles, Skintight, and Bad Jews) provides a first rate, prop-clogged set. Those of you interested in such mundane topics as music rights might be amused by the way the oft-repeated incidental music borrows so heavily from Joseph Kosma’s “Autumn Leaves” that it appears devised solely to avoid license payments, and good luck to them.
We leave discussion of the cast to last, as you can’t exactly blame the two actors in question for taking the work. Len Cariou—who back in the seventies was rewarded for heroically supporting Lauren Bacall in the top-heavy Applause by having Sondheim and Prince build both A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd around him, and who currently can be seen on the television series Blue Bloods—returns to the stage in this ever-so-slight trifle. Cariou shoulders the burden with charm, and retains his familiar appeal. (There are times when one wonders if his hesitantly shambling performance is the work of a master craftsman creating a senile character, or an actor struggling with all those damn lines.) Craig Bierko, known to theatergoers for less-than-indispensable performances in Susan Stroman’s productions of The Music Man and Thou Shalt Not, does well enough shoveling Mr. Eastman’s straight lines to the willing Cariou.
What we get, in effect, is a retread of On Golden Pond, only without—well—without everything.
Harry Townsend’s Last Stand opened December 4, 2019, at City Center Stage II and runs through February 9, 2020. Tickets and information: harrytownsendslaststand.com
