In Vivian Neuwirth’s Mr. Toole, inspired by her experience as a student of the author John Kennedy Toole, a famous literary character looms large—but it’s not the one you’d necessarily expect.
When we meet Ken Toole, as the titular writer was known to family and friends, in the play, he is the sole male teacher at St. Mary’s Dominican, an all-girls’ college in New Orleans where Neuwirth took Toole’s literature class. Though Ken has already written A Confederacy of Dunces—the novel that will earn him a posthumous Pulitzer Prize and cult hero status following his suicide in 1969, at the age of 31—his day job separates him from Dunces‘s erudite slob of a protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, and the other colorful figures in that book, whom Ken describes at one point as “visitors…Begging me to tell their story. They wouldn’t stop until I put them on the page and made them live.”
Instead, the aspiring novelist spends his days leading pupils through T.S. Eliot’s “The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock,” while in his time off grappling with a sense of frustrated inertia not unlike the one documented in that poem. Living with his smothering, domineering mother and broken father, Ken—played with disarming gentleness and mounting desolation by Ryan Spahn, whose soft good looks bear a certain resemblance to Toole’s—fields rejection letters until finally garnering interest from Simon & Schuster’s then-chief editor, Robert Gottlieb; that ray of hope fades, though, with Gottlieb eventually declining to publish Dunces.
Essentially a memory play, Mr. Toole traces this final, desperate stage in Toole’s life and the consequences of his early death through the eyes of an enamored student, Lisette (a coquettish, charming Julia Randall), whom we see between the ages of 17 and 28. But no character, including Ken, is more prominent than his proud, troubled mom, Thelma, brought to shattering life in a bravura performance by Linda Purl. What may seem at first to be an account of a bright girl’s first crush—part romantic, part intellectual (Ken and Lisette recite telling passages from “Proofrock” throughout the play)—becomes, principally, a portrait of a parent’s grief, and of her unlikely resilience.
At one hour and 50 minutes long with no intermission, Neuwirth’s play is not consistently riveting; there are passages that drag slightly, even under Cat Parker’s vivid, muscular direction. But the intensity and subtle wit with which the characters are drawn stir and haunt us—suggesting how Toole might have been inspired by everyone, and everything, around him. Morry Campbell’s sound design emphasizes the local flavor that saturates Dunces, regaling us with Louis Armstrong recordings and New Orleans funeral marches. George Allison’s canny set uses video to portray the comfort, grandeur and seediness of the surroundings, from the Tooles’s kitchen to a nearby church and nursing home.
The performances are uniformly superb, down to the smaller supporting roles, with Thomas G. Waites offering a gritty, moving turn as Thelma’s humble brother, Arthur, and John Ingle lending grace and gravitas as Walker Percy, a champion of Toole, who is besieged and beseeched by Thelma in one memorable scene. In the larger part of Ken’s dad, John, Stephen Schnetzer is heartbreaking, wandering like a lost child through his home, neglected and humiliated by the woman he married and still loves, who is unhealthily preoccupied with their son.
Ken appears to those who loved him in flashbacks, a sort of summoned ghost—as a child, making a game of identifying cars with John; as a young man, courting Lisette in her dreams, walking away but always returning. “That’s my dream too,” Thelma marvels, when Lisette tells her. Perhaps Mr. Toole‘s ultimate message is that there is both pain and beauty in inspiration, whether it’s provided by art or by people.
Mr. Toole opened March 4, 2020, at 59E59 and runs through March 15. Tickets and information: 59e59.org
