TT: Get the guests

In today’s Wall Street Journal column, I review the Transport Group’s superb off-Broadway revival of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, plus Sam Mendes’ Bridge Project production of The Tempest and a new play by Douglas Carter Beane, Mr. and Mrs. Fitch. Here’s an excerpt.
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If I had to draw up a list of the most effective American plays of the past half-century, Mart Crowley’s “The Boys in the Band,” in which a group of unhappy gay men gather for a birthday party and spend the night picking at one another’s psychic scabs, would be on it. Mr. Crowley’s best-remembered play may not be a masterpiece, but it’s exceptionally well constructed and as compelling as a fist fight, and the Transport Group’s Off-Broadway revival–only the second in New York since “The Boys in the Band” opened in 1968–does it near-complete justice.
The Transport Group is presenting “The Boys in the Band” in a site-specific “environmental” production directed with taut fervor by Jack Cummings III, designed by Sandra Goldmark and set in an actual penthouse space in midtown Manhattan, with the 99 members of the audience scattered throughout the living room. The results are unnervingly intimate–the nine actors are in your lap all evening long–and so believable that you’ll flinch when the insults start flying….
Does Sam Mendes really like Shakespeare? The staging of “The Tempest” that he’s mounted under the auspices of the Bridge Project, in which Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey and London’s Old Vic Theatres jointly produce a pair of classics each season performed by binational casts, makes me wonder. Like last year’s “Winter’s Tale,” it’s so cluttered and idea-ridden that the play comes close to getting lost in the shuffle…
Douglas Carter Beane’s latest, “Mr. and Mrs. Fitch,” is the tale of a pair of washed-up gossip columnists (John Lithgow and Jennifer Ehle) who rejuvenate their careers by publishing a scandalous story about an imaginary person. Even if the premise were less trite, the play would still be a bore, consisting as it does of several thousand bitchy one- and two-liners lined up in a row, few of which are funny….
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Read the whole thing here.