Archives for January 23, 2009

I came back to New York long enough to catch the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan, then headed west for a pair of California revivals of two plays by John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation in San Diego and Rich and Famous in San Francisco. California is getting the better end of the deal. Here’s an excerpt from today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I review all three shows.
* * *
In 1990 “Six Degrees of Separation” was the play all smart Manhattanites had to see, partly because Stockard Channing was so good in it but mostly because Mr. Guare’s satire of upper-middle-class folkways was so well timed. Money talked very loudly in 1990, and those who didn’t have any longed for a close-up view of the foibles of those who did. Back then I found “Six Degrees” to be clever but shallow, which says far more about me than Mr. Guare. Today it strikes me as one of the strongest American plays of the postwar era, a comedy of liberal manners (and liberal gullibility) whose punch lines are rooted in something more than mere knowingness. In telling the real-life tale of a young black con man (Samuel Stricklen) who wormed his way into a string of Fifth Avenue apartments by passing himself off as Sidney Poitier’s nonexistent son, Mr. Guare tapped into the loneliness and insecurity that have always been part of the American national character. We are all Gatsbys now, his characters told us, and their message rings as true in the Age of Obama as it did in the far-off days of Bush the Elder.
Nowadays “Six Degrees” doesn’t get done as often as it should, presumably because it calls for a cast of 15 and an expensive-looking set. Not only has San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre pulled both commodities out of its institutional hat, but Trip Cullman, the director, has brought off the coup of casting Karen Ziemba in the role that made Ms. Channing a stage star. Ms. Ziemba won a well-deserved Tony for “Contact,” but in recent years she’s been relegated to second-banana status on Broadway, and this is the first time that I’ve seen her in a straight play. It was worth the wait: Ms. Ziemba plays Ouisa, the anxious socialite of “Six Degrees,” with an open-hearted warmth that puts a fresh and convincing spin on Mr. Guare’s script…
Though Mr. Guare’s brand of comedy often runs to the zany, he never forgets to make you feel. “Rich and Famous,” now playing at the American Conservatory Theater, is a maniacally funny portrait of Bing Ringling (Brooks Ashmanskas), an unknown playwright who longs in vain to hit the jackpot. Unlike the tightly woven “Six Degrees,” “Rich and Famous,” which dates from 1976, adds up to a series of sketches, one of which contains a brutal skewering of Leonard Bernstein (Stephen DeRosa), with whom Mr. Guare worked in his youth. Yet its specific emotional gravity is surprisingly high, and the overall effect is less farcical than melancholy, especially in the poignant scene in which Bing, Mr. Guare’s maladroit alter ego, runs into an ex-girlfriend (Mary Birdsong) and finds that his failure looks like success from her suburban point of view….
Richard Greenberg is back on Broadway yet again, this time with a revival of “The American Plan,” the 1990 play that put him on the map. It is, like all his other plays, repellently glib, and seeing it in tandem with “Six Degrees of Separation” also suggests that it is…oh, let’s be nice and call it derivative. Like “Six Degrees,” “The American Plan” is a snapshot of upper-middle-class life that hinges on the deceptions of a presentable young man who turns out to be (A) poor and (B) gay. In “The American Plan,” the young man in question (Kieran Campion) is courting a rich girl (Lily Rabe) who is brainy but neurotic, and the air becomes clotted with pseudo-witty one-liners….
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“Being a playwright is like being a Secret Service man. It’s not something you wrote; it’s somebody whose security you’re in charge of. And you’re always waiting to see where the sniper is going to come from.”
John Guare (quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Jan. 8, 2009)