Only a few minutes into the streamed production of Dan Clancy’s Middletown, my mind began to wander to another Middletown: the pseudonym for Muncie, Indiana chosen by sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd a century ago, in their investigation of what might be called the quote/unquote “American character.” They found Muncie to be, in short, a bastion of white working-class, nuclear-family conformity, and famously extrapolated from it to generalize about the nation as a whole.
Well, I don’t know whether Clancy is familiar with the Lynds or Muncie. But he certainly seems to have taken the stereotype to heart in his saga of two couples whose friendship begins when the wives meet at their daughter’s kindergarten, and ends—well, at death and beyond, I guess you’d say.
Their demographics are baldly laid out in the first scene. Don Abrams (who describes himself as Republican, Jewish, oatmeal, Budweiser) is the grumpy owner of a pool company while dotty wife Dotty (Independent, Lutheran, granola, martinis) is a schoolteacher. They are played by Don—promoted from Donny—Most with the same goofy amiability he brought to Ralph Malph on Happy Days, and Didi Conn, no less ebullient than she was as a beauty school dropout in Grease.
In this corner, Tom Hogan (Liberal, agnostic, Frosted Flakes, Johnnie Walker Black) is some sort of commuting executive while wife Peg (Democrat, Catholic, Cheerios, gin & tonics) keeps house. Grease 2 and T.J. Hooker alum Adrian Zmed is avuncular when not abashed, and Sandy Duncan has lost none of the charisma she had as Peter Pan, though without similar material to dazzle with.
For all the character differences, there is little conflict among these four paragons of middle-class uprightness. One of them cheats and is forgiven. One woman slights the other—yes, she’s forgiven too—and as we move from the 1960s and prosperity to the present day and Alzheimer’s, there’s barely a ripple caused by any of the tumultuous changes wrought in the last half-century. Granted, the couples are shaken by 9/11, but the women’s movement gets little consideration, and if anyone of color enters into the Hogans’ or the Abrams’ orbit, I missed it. Gayness shows up briefly on the part of the next generation, and Vietnam in a brief bonding opportunity for the husbands: “How bad was it?” Pause. “Real bad.” That is as deep as the script cuts.
What remains is a litany of brand names, predictable events, and “Remember that”’s clearly designed to allow audiences of a certain age—particularly fans of the four stars’ past media efforts—to sit back, smile, and nod knowingly. I nodded, too, but not smiling. Here’s a litmus test of whether this show will delight you: “When she told me he worked in Silicon Valley, I thought he was making breast implants.”
As you might guess, that line is delivered by Conn with enormous likability. All four actors are likable. As they stand with their scripts at music stands, directed by Seth Greenleaf, they practically bask in likability. But to what end?
I’m honestly delighted if audiences respond to Clancy in the way he intends. COVID has made the pursuit of happiness an imperative for everyone, and I’ll be damned if I demur at anyone’s simple pleasures. As our characters’ contemporaries the Beatles remind us, “it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter,” and so “whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right.” The spectators on the soundtrack at the Earl & Rachel Smith Strand Theatre in Marietta, GA, whence the play was recorded pre-pandemic, certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves, and they should live and be well.
But when real theater, theater with sets and props and memorized lines, comes back, surely it’s o.k. to hope that that which falls under the category of “popular plays” will be less bland, less anodyne, than this.
Middletown was streamed beginning March 4, 2021 and will remain online through April 4. Information and tickets: middletownplay.com
