‘A Very Strange Party’ in Denis Johnson’s Final Play

When the National Book Award-winning novelist, poet, and playwright Denis Johnson died in 2017, the headline of his New York Times obituary noted he had written “of the failed and the desperate.” Johnson’s work, which also included short stories and journalism, had impressed the likes of John Updike and Wallace Shawn.It was Mr. Shawn, in fact, who recommended Johnson to the founding artistic director of Brooklyn’s highly regarded Theatre for a New Audience, Jeffrey Horowitz. The theatre organized a staged reading of Johnson’s final play, “Des Moines,” in 2013. A weeklong workshop was staged two years later, but it’s only now that the play is making its New York premiere. In a program note, Mr. Horowitz recalls he initially “couldn’t say I understood why it ended where it did or even what the play was about,” and that even after the workshop, he felt it needed “more clarifying.” Johnson, however, would not make any further revisions. “Looking back,” Mr. Horowitz writes, “Denis was right, and his clear refusal to change was compelling.” Perhaps it was — the refusal, that is — but the play itself remains a bit unwieldy.Certainly, the failed and desperate characters inhabiting “Des Moines,” set in the upstairs flat of a two-story building in the Iowa city, are a colorful bunch; and director Arin Arbus — whose credits at Theatre for a New Audience include acclaimed productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg — has recruited a group of accomplished and supple performers to bring them to life. Arliss Howard plays Dan, a cab driver whose provincialism is immediately established when he keeps referring to a recent passenger’s wife as the “Black lady.” Johanna Day is cast as Marta, his wife, whose breezy manner belies the fact she has known great tragedy and is seriously ill. Dan and Marta live with their grown grandchild, Jimmy — played by “Transparent” alumna Hari Nef — who is confined to a wheelchair as the result of a mishap during her sex-change operation.There are two visitors: Mrs. Drinkwater — the aforementioned “Black lady,” portrayed by Heather Alicia Simms — whose husband died in a plane crash after Dan dropped him off at the airport; and Father Michael, a priest who has a fondness for lipstick, played by Michael Shannon. If you’re envisioning a very strange party at this point, you’re on the right track. Riccardo Hernández’s set presents a modest but neat kitchen, with terra cotta wood set off by a lime-green tablecloth, that eventually opens to reveal Jimmy’s much gaudier room—a sort of makeshift, holiday-themed disco, with a phonograph and Christmas lights. (Costume designer Qween Jean has given Ms. Nef a Santa hat and fabulous, sparkly boots.)Before the one-act play runs its course—roughly 100 minutes, though the last 30 or 40 feel longer—the place has been trashed, a process abetted by rounds of drinks that Dan and Michael refer to as “depth chargers.” The bacchanal includes a string of karaoke performances; anyone who didn’t see Mr. Shannon in the film “Elvis & Nixon” can check his hilariously delicate rendering of “Love Me Tender” here. There is darkness lurking behind this revelry, but we tend to see it in flashes—Marta’s references to her “tragic angelic daughter,” for instance, or Michael’s comments about urban sprawl, or Jimmy’s sudden declaration that “God doesn’t really know what he’s doing”; but few connections are made. Mr. Johnson seems to have been more interested in, or was at least more effective at, conveying their social and spiritual angst through the absurdity of their language and behavior, and the situation they find themselves in.It’s a testament to the piquance of the writing, and the adroitness of the acting, that there are funny and, on occasion, moving moments. Mr. Shannon, particularly, uses his deadpan mastery to winning effect. Explaining the satisfaction he gets from putting makeup on to Jimmy, Michael says, “When I’m lost in thought and I look up and somebody’s staring at me, stricken, it puts a flavor of something in my mouth.”But such lines, however evocative or provocative, need more solid thread between them to sustain a play, even a short one. While I left the theater wishing all the characters in “Des Moines” well, I also wished that I’d been able to leave their party a little earlier.

‘A Very Strange Party’ in Denis Johnson’s Final Play

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