On the surface, Lorraine, the suburban matron played by Susan Sarandon in The New Group’s world premiere production of Jesse Eisenberg’s Happy Talk, is a comically complacent narcissist. Though she shares a comfortable home with her seemingly ailing husband and dying mother, Lorraine appears most devoted to the theater program at the local Jewish Community Center, where she is currently cast as Bloody Mary in South Pacific. The title of Eisenberg’s new play obviously refers to a song delivered by that character, but it also suggests the blithe insouciance with which Lorraine—a self-proclaimed artist, with a string of JCC triumphs under her belt—approaches trivial problems, like, say, other people’s.
“Someone say something sad or angry and you just pretend like what they say is happy,” Ljuba, a Serbian woman hired to care for Lorraine’s mom, tells her. “Is like you don’t even hear them sometimes.”
But the more we get to know about Lorraine, and the people surrounding her, the more we question her intent to “keep things light-hearted”—particularly after Ljuba, played by Marin Ireland, enlists her help in finding a husband, so that she can secure a green card. What seems at first to be a breezy domestic satire, of a demographic whose members include many theatergoers, gradually emerges as something more complex and disturbing.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Under Scott Elliott”s nimble direction, Sarandon and Ireland do superb, nuanced work traversing the different roles and responsibilities suggested in Lorraine and Ljuba’s friendly, fraught relationship. Though Ljuba, roughly 20 years younger at 40, remains keenly aware that Lorraine is her employer, Lorraine, in her vanity and apparent obliviousness, envisions them more as peers; at one point, she imagines building a pool outside where the pair can lounge around, “two gorgeous women sitting poolside.”
Key to their bond, though, and to the play’s twisting trajectory, is that Lorraine and Ljuba both have grown daughters. Lubja has been sending hers money—a service that her lady-of-leisure boss views, ironically, as too charitable—and wishes to get a green card largely so that she can bring her to the United States. Lorraine hasn’t seen her own daughter for quite some time, though what’s keeping them apart is clearly more complicated.
Eisenberg crafts characters and dialogue that will prove instantly accessible, and very funny, both to those intimately acquainted with the milieu he’s sending up and the presumable minority of audience members who aren’t. (Derek McLane’s set design is perfectly in sync, embellishing tidy bourgeois décor with theater posters.) There’s Lorraine’s bouncy JCC co-star, Ronny, played by a hilarious Nico Santos, who’s forever breaking into song and musical-theater references, often bringing Lorraine, ever eager to perform, along with him.
On the flip side is Lorraine’s husband, Bill, whom the marvelous Daniel Oreskes introduces as a sour shell of a man, barely acknowledging his wife as she prepares him a microwaved dinner. When a jolt of pain overcomes him, it is Ljuba who arrives at his side, wordlessly pressing his shoulder. Though Bill seldom speaks, Oreskes and Sarandon ensure that his few words and the tense exchanges between the couple, frequently non-verbal on his end, raise poignant questions about what he has endured, and what she has.
There’s one other character, a brash young woman (played by an excellent Tedra Millan) who arrives abruptly and spends a relatively short amount of time onstage, though her presence makes us again wonder—and not for the last time—how much sympathy and scorn Lorraine deserves. It’s to the shared credit of Eisenberg, Sarandon and Elliott that this central character, for all the clichés she evokes, becomes as compelling, funny and unsettling as she does.
Happy Talk opened May 16, 2019, at Signature Center and runs through June 16. Tickets and information: thenewgroup.org
