Even if you don’t detect the irony in the title Everything’s Fine, you likely won’t be prepared for the horror show that unfolds in Douglas McGrath’s deceptively folksy, charming one-man play.
McGrath, the prolific writer, filmmaker and actor whose credits range from “Saturday Night Live” and Bullets Over Broadway to essays in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, wrote and stars in Everything’s Fine, a recollection of his youth in the sleepy town of Midland, Texas, where he lived until entering boarding school in the tenth grade. McGrath likens the experience, with palpable affection, to “growing up inside a blow-drier full of dirt.”
We learn about McGrath’s father, an oil man who lost an eye in a childhood accident, and sharp-witted mother, who had worked at Harper’s Bazaar in New York City and befriended Andy Warhol before settling down to raise a family. There’s a best buddy, Eddie, whose precocity McGrath humbly juxtaposes with his own “barely cocious” standing.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
And then there is Mrs. Malenkov, the middle-aged history teacher who landed in McGrath’s school and his life like an asteroid when he was in the eighth grade. She was, McGrath recalls at first, “one of those teachers who liked to make learning ‘fun,'” dressing unconventionally and redecorating her classroom with posters and mobiles designed by her pupils.
Alas, Mrs. Malenkov’s non-traditional practices did not stop there, and McGrath proceeds to chronicle—without changing his relaxed, amiable tone—a pattern of behavior that, suffice it to say, would make any middle- or high-school teacher in our era the subject of investigation, suspension and possibly worse.
I won’t say more, except that the nature of this abuse—I’ll call it that, though McGrath never does—is psychological rather than physical, but nonetheless profound. But McGrath does something that is, particularly by current standards, remarkable: He expresses empathy for the woman. “How many people,” he asks towards the end of the show, “even in our ghastly, Tell Everything world, carry their troubles alone and at what grinding cost?”
It’s a question that should be asked far more often than it is, and even if you leave this performance wishing, as I did, that Mrs. Malenkov had been relieved of her duties (at least until she got the help she clearly needed), you’ll be moved by the sheer kindness and genuine humility that permeate McGrath’s writing and demeanor—especially, indeed, in our ghastly, Tell Everything world, where the opposite qualities increasingly get more attention.
Under John Lithgow’s gentle direction—yes, that John Lithgow—McGrath extends this approach in addressing less fraught subjects and events. The desks and chairs in John Lee Beatty’s appropriately modest set can suggest a classroom or a kitchen, with places left for those who inform the memories, and incidental piano music and songs such as “Teacher’s Pet” and “Come On-a My House” winkingly accompany pauses and transitions.
The effect is that of an unassuming storyteller casting a strange, quiet spell, one that discourages harsh judgment and suggests we appreciate our blessings, past and present. That’s no easy task, of course, but for about 90 minutes, McGrath makes it seem like a sure recipe for contentment.
Everything’s Fine opened October 13, 2022, at the DR2 Theatre and closed November 3. Tickets and information: everythingsfineplay.org
