Sometimes a writer has absolutely nothing to say but writes a play about it anyway.
Such seems to be the case for The Perplexed, a dull and pointless new comedy by Richard Greenberg, the author of Take Me Out, The Assembled Parties, and other works far better than this dud.
Opening with a thud on Tuesday, Manhattan Theatre Club’s handsome production of the play proves to be so much dressing up a corpse, since the damned thing never really comes to life.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Perhaps the best way to describe The Perplexed for students of the drama is that it’s a modern-day Philip Barry drawing room comedy smashed with a Wendy Wasserstein sort of Manhattan Jewish society saga and sprinkled with bits taken from hits by dear old Clyde Fitch.
Whatever its derivative ingredients, Greenberg’s cake fails to rise.
Babble from a wedding party being celebrated in an offstage ballroom arises intermittently as characters come and go in the library of a fancy Fifth Avenue apartment of today. This is the luxe abode of Berland, hideous patriarch of the wealthy Stahl family. Berland never appears during the two-act play, but he is reported by others to be dementedly rampaging amid the offstage festivities.
The marriage of Berland’s nice granddaughter Isabelle Stahl (Tess Frazer) to Caleb Resnik (JD Taylor), another nice soul, seals a longtime if mysterious rupture between their respective Jewish families.
It appears pretty obvious that Isabelle’s mother Evy (Margaret Colin), a busy city councilman, is trying extremely hard to tolerate, let alone get along with Caleb’s mother Natalie (Ilana Levine), a vacuous socialite. The two dads appear cordial with each other, although the withdrawn and possibly secretly alcoholic Joseph Stahl (Frank Wood) contrasts against a genial Ted Resnik (Gregg Edelman).
Others in Greenberg’s negligible story include: Evy’s son Micah (Zane Pais), lately appearing in gay porn films; Evy’s brother James (Patrick Breen), a novelist who seems to have no reason for being in the play at all; Cyrus (Eric William Morris), a bumbling family friend who will officiate at the ceremony; and Patricia (Anna Itty), Berland’s harassed though ever-patient aide.
The piece is mostly structured as a series of two-person dialogues, as in a sequence when the mild-mannered James confides to his sister Evy that he would like to mow down all the people in the world he considers “evil.” Perhaps the playwright wants these scenes and his play as a whole to illuminate the older folks as representatives of a fading Boomer society.
These individuals, old and younger, and their issues tend to be underdeveloped and are not especially interesting, alas. (How’d they make their money, by the way?) That the family ogre Berland remains offstage seems like a cheat to me.
Enough about the play. It is unlikely to ever be staged anywhere again. Viewers might be perplexed why MTC has produced it at all, but theater companies often invest in playwrights rather than individual works. This Greenberg play may be trifling, and it is, but perhaps the next one that the gifted author writes for MTC will be a wonder.
In the meantime, Lynne Meadow stages the piece at a steady clip with tip-top designers providing the visuals, although the contrived demands of the play result in an awkward if handsome setting by the great Santo Loquasto that looks more like the first class ladies’ parlor aboard the old Kronprinzessin Cecilie than a library in a Manhattan apartment, however swank.
The top-tier actors assembled for the production adeptly do what they can to flesh out their underwritten characters.
Meadow, a founder and the artistic director of MTC, probably has better things to do with her time than apply expensive CPR to a lesser play by a major playwright, but it’s good to see her remain in the game as a creative artist in support of Greenberg’s work.
The Perplexed opened March 3, 2020, at City Center Stage I and runs through March 29. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
