A Little Class Doesn’t Go All the Way

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The New York Sun

Time and farce are mortal enemies. Bringing lots of characters with lots of divergent needs into any confined space (preferably one with lots of slammable doors) isn’t easy, but audiences will forgive any short cuts and implausibilities as long as you just get to it. If you don’t, as is the case with Manhattan Theatre Club’s spotty revival of the 1973 Alan Ayckbourn comedy “Absurd Person Singular,” the momentum is virtually impossible to regain. John Tillinger’s miscalibrated production lopes when it should gallop, settling into Mr. Ayckbourn’s rhythms far too late. Old pros like Paxton Whitehead and Deborah Rush offer compensatory satisfactions, molding their gifts to Mr. Tillinger’s leisurely pace, but they can’t reverse the crippling lethargy.


“Absurd Person Singular” (the catchy title is essentially meaningless, a carryover from an abandoned earlier Ayckbourn play) is a slight but crafty tale of three disastrous Christmas Eve cocktail parties in three different London kitchens. The action moves from the modest home of the striving Sidney and Jane Hopcroft (Alan Ruck and Clea Lewis) to the garret of the bohemian Geoff and Eva Jackson (Sam Robards and Mireille Enos) to the well-appointed but chilly manse of the play’s elders, Ronald and Marion Brewster-Wright (Mr. Whitehead and Ms. Rush). The kitchens are meant to reflect the socioeconomic status of their respective owners, although most Londoners – or New Yorkers, for that matter – would kill for even poor Geoff and Eva’s sprawling kitchen.


That surfeit of comfort extends beyond John Lee Beatty’s inviting sets. When one character leaves and nearly two seconds elapse before the next one enters, either someone is missing cues backstage or the director hasn’t impressed upon his cast the urgency of constant forward motion. In either case, far too much energy is expended on both sides of the footlights to prop up the slight goings-on of Act I.


So it comes as a bit of a surprise when the second act hits its stride about halfway through. Some of the business surrounding the unstable Eva and her numerous suicide attempts falls flat, but just as her energy begins to flag (thanks to a fistful of sleeping pills), Mr. Tillinger’s energy picks up. Even more surprisingly, the far more contemplative third act is the funniest and saddest, as several characters actually stop to look at the disastrous states of their marriages and their lives.


This shift in tone is jarring at first: With most farces, there isn’t any subtext beyond the genre’s opposing demands for structural tidiness and comic entropy. But Mr. Ayckbourn repeatedly trains his eye on class, and the fluidity with which Sidney climbs the societal ladder plays an important role in the play.


Or at least it should. In part because of Mr. Tillinger’s lugubrious Act I staging and in part because of Mr. Ruck’s glib performance, we see plenty of Sidney’s loutishness but none of the conniving ambition that drives him. By the end of “Absurd Person Singular,” the other two couples have submitted to the newly successful businessman’s holiday whims, literally dancing to his tune, but this reversal of fortune reads like just another slapstick bit. God knows this isn’t “Howards End” – in fact, I can’t remember a single instance of a character dancing with an orange between their knees in any of E.M. Forster’s books. But the production’s obtuseness toward this singularly British notion of class goes a long way toward explaining why the absurdly prolific (69 plays and counting) Mr. Ayckbourn has never really replicated his British success in America.


The performances are uneven: Mr. Robards has little more success than Mr. Ruck in getting beyond his character’s caddishness, while Ms. Lewis overplays Jane’s neatnik shtick. Ms. Enos starts out hewing a bit too closely to her Honey in last season’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” revival, adding only the tiniest variations on the unhinged-dishrag-wife theme. But she manages well enough with the suicide slapstick and comes into her own in Act III with a quiet, rueful vengeance.


In fact, this production’s dramatic force comes entirely in the final act, courtesy of Ms. Enos and the priceless Mr. Whitehead, who offers his umpteenth nuanced gloss on the stereotype of the tweedy, slightly clueless Brit. Men like this exist in farce to get splashed in the crotch with soda water and covered with women’s clothes, and both of these things happen to Ronald. But he also steps through the silliness to wonder, seemingly for the first time, why his wives have been so unhappy and whether his aloofness has had anything to do with it: “One minute you’re having a perfectly good time and the next, you suddenly see them there like – some old sports jacket or something – literally beginning to come apart at the seams.” Wife no. 2 also gets her say – the dipsomaniacal Marion’s acid wit has provided much of the evening’s pleasures, but Ms. Rush deftly turns Marion’s contempt inward with withering honesty. These harsh, almost Chekhovian moments go a long way toward salvaging the production. But not far enough.


“Absurd Person Singular” is one of those old chestnuts that raises eyebrows among the theater community. With all the exciting young playwrights itching to reach Broadway, the argument goes, why this? Of course, a solid production renders all the tsk-tsking moot; who out there really thought we needed a production of “Twelve Angry Men”? But with so many dead patches, Manhattan Theatre Club (which touts itself as “New York’s home for contemporary work” on its Web site) gives us far too much time to ask these sorts of questions. The answers aren’t the ones it hoped for.


Until December 18 (261 W. 47th Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, 212-239-6200).


The New York Sun

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