TT: 1378 and all that

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s Medieval Play and a San Diego-area revival, North Coast Rep’s double bill of Harold Pinter’s The Lover and The Dumb Waiter. Here’s an excerpt.
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Kenneth Lonergan is a master of subtle, intimate theatrical naturalism who decisively established himself in “This Is Our Youth,” “You Can Count on Me” and “The Starry Messenger” as one of America’s foremost playwrights and screenwriters. But he is also, lest we forget, a co-author of the screenplay for “Analyze This,” and his broadly comic side comes to the fore in “Medieval Play,” a mile-wide farce about the Great Schism of 1378 which has about as much in common with “The Starry Messenger” as “Airplane!” has with “The Seventh Seal.” “Medieval Play” is billed as “a new and meandering comedy with no contemporary parallels worth noting.” I suspect that this blurb was penned by Mr. Lonergan himself, because it nicely conveys the feel of “Medieval Play,” which is by turns silly and sophomoric, surprisingly smart, very funny and–sure enough–meandering.
If you aren’t familiar with the Great Schism, it’s enough to say that the Roman Catholic Church had two popes between 1378 and 1417, one based in Italy and the other in France, and that the rival claimants to the papal throne, not to mention their respective supporters, didn’t get along even slightly. Enter Sir Ralph (Josh Hamilton) and Sir Alfred (Tate Donovan), a pair of moronic knights who stumble into the middle of this messy conflict and, inspired by Catherine of Siena (Heather Burns), forswear raping and pillaging oand endeavor with limited success to hew to the path of righteousness.
Mr. Lonergan has turned this conflict into a one-joke play, the joke being that all of the characters in “Medieval Play” speak not in the language of Europe circa 1378 but of America circa 2012….
The problem is that in addition to writing the script, he’s also staged it. It’s not that he isn’t a good director, but anyone else would have ordered him to cut at least a half hour, if not more, out of “Medieval Play.” Instead we get a one-joke show that runs for 155 minutes. If, like me, you have a furtive fondness for brainy juvenile humor, you’ll enjoy yourself anyway, but the fact remains that “Medieval Play” is far too long for its own good….
The enigmatic plays of Harold Pinter are still a hard sell at most regional theaters, so I thought it would be interesting to see how they went over when mounted by a San Diego-area company headquartered in a shopping center. Judging by the unselfconsciously enthusiastic response of the crowd that turned out for the opening night of North Coast Repertory Theatre’s double bill of “The Lover” and “The Dumb Waiter,” it appears that Mr. Pinter has a big future in the suburbs….
David Ellenstein, the company’s artistic director, has put together a dynamite cast led by Elaine Rivkin, a Chicago-based actor who is icebox-cool in “The Lover” as a dissatisfied housewife who dallies each afternoon with…but I mustn’t give it away. Mr. Ellenstein’s cracker-crisp staging points up the laughter in both plays without stinting on their underlying menace…
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Read the whole thing here.
The set change for North Coast Rep’s double bill of The Lover and The Dumb Waiter, accompanied by Schumann’s A Minor Piano Concerto: