'The Real Thing': Revival of Tom Stoppard's Romantic Comedy Is Unfortunately Meh

Quick:  What pop song from the late 1950s is being featured in two different current Broadway shows?

While you are pondering that, let me ask another question.  How could a play written by a world class playwright, a play that won multiple Tony Awards both for its original Broadway production and for a later revival, a play that in its current incarnation features a talented cast and director, be such a yawn-inducing experience to sit through?

Let’s take care of the good news first.  The answer to the first question is Oh Carol, a hit tune for Neil Sedaka in 1959.  It is featured in a live rendition in Beautiful:  The Carole King Musical and via a recording in the revival of the play we’re about to talk about, Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.

The Real Thing, originally produced in 1982, is Stoppard’s take on love, marriage, trust, and betrayal among the British well-to-do. In many ways, you could say it follows in a straight-line path that includes Noël Coward’s Private Lives from 1930, the 1958 Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate (the British connection is, of course, Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew), and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal from 1978. 

By 1982, Stoppard had already penned more than a dozen plays and had made a name for himself as a clever wordsmith in the arena of absurdist theater, with such works as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, and Travesties. With The Real Thing, he tested new waters by putting his hand to what is essentially a romantic comedy, albeit one that employs clever little tricks, literary references, politics, and a serious consideration of questions of the heart. What is it, he asks, that brings people together and then breaks them apart?  To put it another way, and since we’ve already brought Cole Porter into the picture, “What is this thing called love?”

The main characters are three actors, Max, Charlotte, and Annie, and one playwright, Henry. In the beginning, Max is married to Annie, and Henry is married to Charlotte (though, due to one of Mr. Stoppard’s theatrical tricks it takes us a while to figure all this out).  Later, after some onstage hanky-panky and offstage divorces, it is Annie and Henry who are married to each other, and, once things settle down, it is their relationship that becomes the focus of the play. 

Because it mixes elements of a comedy of manners and modern realism, and because it steps outside of itself to comment on the “art of making art,” The Real Thing can be a challenge to produce, but done well, it can be touch both the mind and the heart, and can provide a wonderful opportunity to display first-class acting and directing talents. Back in 1984, with its initial Broadway production, The Real Thing won the Tony Award for best play, and garnered additional Tonys for Jeremy Irons as Henry, Glenn Close as Annie, and Christine Baranski as Charlotte, and for its director Mike Nichols.  A production in 2000 led to Tonys for Stephen Dillane as Henry and Jennifer Ehle as Annie, as well as one for best revival.    

But that was then; this is now. The current revival at the American Airlines Theatre falls flat in every way imaginable, with perhaps the single exception of Ewan McGregor, making his Broadway debut as Henry. Josh Hamilton as Max, Cynthia Nixon as Charlotte, and Maggie Gyllenhaal as Annie are all either terribly miscast, or they are all poorly directed by Sam Gold, whose own history as a director has run hot  (his collaborations with playwright Annie Baker; and Fun Home, which will be coming to Broadway after a highly praised run at the Public Theater) and cold (Picnic; Look Back In Anger). 

Not to belabor things here, but nothing works, from David Zinn’s uninspired set that is stretched across the stage like a film in letterbox format, to Kay Voyce’s equally uninspired costumes, to the very poor renditions of British accents coming out of the mouths of the American actors, a flaw that is on heightened display every time Mr. McGregor converses with any of the others.

Unfortunately, the best thing about The Real Thing is the interspersing of pop tunes like the aforementioned Oh Carol (Henry is a fan of music from the 1960s), in which members of the cast join in singing between scenes.  Maybe it would lift the audience’s spirits to be invited to sing along.

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Kin: A Sharp and Funny Look at Friends and Family

Sam Gold, Kristen Bush, Bathsheba Doran, & Patch Darragh. 

If I were to have a play of my own produced, I can’t think of a an organization I’d rather have behind me than Playwrights Horizons, with its stated mission of supporting and developing contemporary American playwrights—a mission it lives up to consistently and with great results. 

This season alone has given us such lovely little gems as Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution, and Adam Bock’s A Small Fire, both of which I have written about previously.  Now we have Kin, a new play by Bathsheba Doran, which is so clearly a labor of love for all concerned.  

Ms. Doran, who also writes for television, has several plays to her credit and has garnered a number of playwriting awards, although, to judge by published reviews (I’ve not seen any of her previous work), she has not always been wildly embraced by the critics.  

However, I predict a more enthusiastic response to Kin, a sharp and funny riff on the theme of “boy meets girl” that is being performed by a strong ensemble cast—beautifully directed by Sam Gold, a rising star who continues to bring out the best in the productions he is associated with (Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens, and Kim Rosenstock’s Tigers Be Still, to mention but a few of his recent successes).

Kin tells the story of Anna, an Ivy League English lit professor, who becomes romantically involved with Sean, an Irish immigrant who works as a personal trainer.  The pair, well-acted by Kristen Bush and Patch Darragh (“Tom” in Roundabout’s wonderful production of A Glass Menagerie last season), come together, drift apart, and reunite over the course of the play. 

Ms. Doran weaves a tapestry out of short scenes involving the pair and various members of their intersecting and growing circle of friends and family, of which there are perhaps a few more than the weave of the plot can comfortably carry.  At times, I felt as though I were watching one of a series of plays, and that—over time—each of the characters would take turns being the central character. Who knows?  Maybe this is what the playwright has in mind. 

If that is so, at least two of them deserve plays of their own.  One is Anna’s neurotic actress friend Helena who keeps popping in and out of Anna's life.  As portrayed by Laura Heisler, Helena is both wacky-funny and a little scary.  If a scene involving a bear and a hunter seems to have been dropped into Kin from some other play altogether, it is also very much in keeping with the character. 

The other deeply compelling role is that of Linda, Sean’s agoraphobic mother back in Ireland.  Richly portrayed by Suzanne Bertish, Linda is given a powerful and moving back-story, so that when she emerges from her home for the first time in decades, it becomes a momentous occasion.

Director Gold manages all of the intersecting storylines with great skill, aided splendidly by scenic designer Paul Steinberg, who keeps the many scene changes moving at a rapid pace and throws in at least one surprising touch that takes a common theatrical device and pushes it over the top to hilarious results.

Given Ms. Doran’s increasing visibility as a television writer, the playwright may decide that Hollywood is where her future lies.  If that’s the case, I would encourage her to keep the characters she has so lovingly introduced in Kin and further develop them for a wider audience.  And while she is at it, I hope she continues to find time for writing for the theater.  Perhaps an Obie or two would provide the impetus to keep her coming back to New York. 

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The Coward: Like Gilbert and Sullivan, But Without the Songs

Apart from the blood and guts (literally) that spew across the stage of the Duke Theater, playwright Nick Jones has given us a clever, often laugh-out-loud romp of a tale in The Coward, now previewing as part of Lincoln Center’s LCT3 productions of new works by up-and-coming playwrights.

Part Monty Python, part W. S. Gilbert (i. e. Gilbert and Sullivan without Mr. Sullivan's music), part Saturday Night Live, The Coward tells the tale of one Lucidus Culling, the scaredy-cat scion of an 18^th century English nobleman whose sole aim in life is to see to it that the family’s honor is upheld through a never-ending round of duels—which explains why Lucidus is the family’s only-surviving son, a status he longs to preserve.

Picture Pee-wee Herman without his confident self-assuredness, or the Cowardly Lion as he quivers before the throne of the Wizard of Oz, and you will get a sense of how Lucidus (performed with great timid flair by Jeremy Strong) faces the world. 

Poor Lucidus.  All he wants is to be left alone to contemplate the beauty of butterflies or to join in tart-tasting picnics with his foppish friends Robert and Gavin (well acted by Steven Boyer and Stephen Ellis), who seem like he-men in comparison, or to pine over the distant but beautiful and wealthy Isabelle Dupree.   He also knows what he most definitely does not want, and that is to die in a duel.

That Lucidus is a disappointment to his father (a blustery Richard Poe) is an epic understatement.  So, with great reluctance, and in order to get into Daddy’s good graces, Lucidus agrees to fight a duel with the next person who manages to offend.  Not surprisingly, he targets a decrepit, blind old man—failing to understand that the rules of nobility allow for the old man to appoint his own strong and skilled son to stand in for him.

How Lucidus deals with this unexpected turn of events makes up the rest of Act I.  Suffice it to say, by Act II he has acquired a new reputation that has pleased his father to no end and has caught the amorous attention of Isabelle (played in grand Gilbert and Sullivan mode by Kristen Schaal).  

The play is aided to no small end by Gabriel Berry's dandified costumes, including some gloriously over-the-top hats.  Between Berry's work here, and the costumes created by Ann Hould-Ward for A Free Man of Color, theatrical closets are now bursting with 18th century fashion. 

If I were to make one suggestion, that would be to trim some of Act II, where the high comic style wanders into the world of too-much, including an abundance of blood, gore, and mean-spirited dialog.  The playwright seems to want to add some, in my view, unnecessary satiric bite to what had been a more subtle but still clear message underpinning the silliness. 

Still, Nick Jones is a smart and witty writer who has given us an original and clever play.  And mark The Coward as another feather in the cap of director Sam Gold, who is making quite a name for himself heading up such productions as last year’s Circle Mirror Transformation and The Aliens (both by Annie Baker), and the current sold-out production of Tigers Be Still (by Kim Rosenstock), and who has been appointed as the youngest associate artist of the Roundabout Theater Company.  Mr. Gold and the three playwrights mentioned here are in their 20s and 30s and represent a wave of wonderful young creative artists that are keeping the theater world moving gloriously into the future. 

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