In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a webcast of Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play. Here’s an excerpt.
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George Street Playhouse is webcasting “It’s Only a Play,” Terrence McNally’s seven-actor farce about what happens at the party immediately following the Broadway premiere of a play that turns out to be awful in every conceivable way (though the particulars of its awfulness are shrewdly left to us to imagine). First performed in 1982, “It’s Only a Play” finally made it to Broadway in 2014 in a revival starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick that ran for 274 performances. It was, needless to say, Messrs. Lane and Broderick who filled the seats, but I’ve since reviewed a 2016 staging by Florida’s GableStage that proved that McNally’s play needs no stars to shine.
This production, directed by Kevin Cahoon and taped to broadcast-quality standards in an empty theater at the New Brunswick Performing Arts Center, is as delightful as its predecessors. Not only are Mr. Cahoon’s staging and the cinematography and editing of Michael Boylan exemplary, but every other element of this production is first-class, including the cast, all of whose members take care of comic business with contagious zest….
“Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.”
I felt that if I couldn’t listen to the first movement of Charles Ives’ Third Symphony right away, I would be reduced to abject despair. Therein lies the supreme spiritual utility of the digital technology that has brought about what is without question the most radical transformation of daily life to take place in my lifetime: I screwed in my earbuds and clicked a few keys on my MacBook, and all at once my head was full of Ives.
Why, though, was it this particular piece that I craved? I’m sure it was because I’d spent an hour talking to my brother on the phone on Tuesday night…
