Stung by the Spotlight in ‘The Scene’

Fourteen-year itches are apparently a lot tougher to scratch than the old seven-year variety.The woes of Charlie, the self-loathing actor at the center of Theresa Rebeck’s undernourished showbiz comedy “The Scene,” go deeper than run-of-the-mill marital discontent. A once-bankable sitcom star who has spent several lean years sponging off his wife, Charlie (Tony Shalhoub, making a long-overdue return to the New York stage) has backslid into a morass of resentment and hostility.Enter the dependably vapid, drop-dead gorgeous Clea (Anna Camp), who represents everything that Charlie holds in contempt but also covets about his line of work: the ability to breeze along in a carefree fog, sheltered by beauty and unburdened by doubt or insight. (Clea on the value of self-awareness: “Because if you lose, like, knowing who you are? If you lose that? You’re lost.”) And so, after first treating her with withering condescension at a glittery Manhattan party, Charlie inevitably starts up a torrid affair with the clueless young thing. The limits of Charlie’s tolerant and accomplished wife, a talk-show booker named Stella (fellow TV veteran Patricia Heaton), are about to be tested.Ms. Rebeck, who has spent enough time in the Hollywood trenches to come by her wicked opinions honestly, has the basic ingredients for a sturdy comedy of bad manners among beautiful people. The sort of barbed romp, in other words, that Second Stage offered last year with “The Little Dog Laughed,” which also included among its four characters a fallible protagonist played by a TV star willing to (briefly) drop his pants. But Ms. Rebeck and director Rebecca Taichman have yet to settle on a tone for this lopsided effort, with a predictable but satisfying set-up giving way to a schematic litany of showdowns. As Charlie’s nubile manifestation of showbiz starts to treat him the same way that the real article has, Act II devolves into a series of heated dialogues; the dramatic momentum congeals and finally crunches to a halt as Charlie, Stella, the cheerfully amoral Clea, and Charlie’s best friend Lewis (Christopher Evan Welch) swap accusations.Except for a refreshingly off-kilter encounter between the two women, little of what’s said is particularly interesting: Charlie actually states at one point, “I just want to feel something. Remember when you felt things?” Despite Ms. Taichman’s efforts to vary the rhythms of these confrontations, the only real surprise (and not exactly a welcome one) comes in the final scene, in which a central character is reduced to incongruously abject circumstances.The acting is not to blame: Ms. Camp does just about everything that can be done with the bimbo role, and Mr. Shalhoub adds an unruly physicality and an impressive willingness to embrace Charlie’s less noble qualities. (When his memories drift back to rosier days, the flashes of remembered glory are palpable.) Stronger still is Ms. Heaton, who brings a vital dose of pathos to her hyperefficient character. And Mr. Welch is an absolute delight in the seemingly peripheral role of Lewis, who initially makes a play for Clea. Mr. Welch spends minutes at a time in a glassy-eyed fog of lust, but this torqued-up state morphs over time into a more nuanced but equally amusing set of conflicted emotions.The entire play unspools within four different apartments, and Derek McLane’s sleek sets crisply span Manhattan’s socioeconomic ladder. Looming behind all four homes are the city’s ever-present windows and water towers. There are 8 million stories in the naked city, we are reminded. “The Scene” is one of them. Actually, with its shopworn thesis and predictable plot twists, it’s a bunch of them.***If “The Scene” doesn’t satisfy your quota of resentment, brace yourself for the unfiltered rage that fuels “Get Your War On,” a popular Internet cartoon receiving a raucous and quite funny adaptation by the Austin, Texas-based theater company Rude Mechanicals.David Rees’s cartoon typically makes “The Daily Show” look as earnest and unquestioning as an Up With People concert. A group of office drones chat on the phone or over doughnuts (Mr. Rees derives his images almost entirely from pre-existing pieces of clip art), giving vent to wildly profane screeds against the John Ashcrofts and Donald Rumsfelds of the world: “When Kissinger signs a U.S. government paycheck, does he use a ballpoint pen or the bloody, severed limb of an East Timorese child?” (Assume that any lines quoted herein have had several expletives deleted.)Rude Mechs, as the company is known, pulls no punches with its delivery of this incendiary material, delivered in chronological order from the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to last month’s hanging of Saddam Hussein. Rather than work too closely at replicating Mr. Rees’s somewhat limited repertoire of visuals, the talented quintet of actors (including Jason Liebrecht and the divine Lana Lesley) augment their droll line readings by manipulating five old-fashioned overhead projectors that sit side by side on a long table. Director Shawn Sides choreographs the interplay among the projected images — important dates, bits of clip art, silly graphics — with a giddy precision that would make Busby Berkeley proud. This frenetic, faux-primitive approach is both a plausible equivalent to and a sly continuation of Mr. Rees’s clenched-jaw minimalism.The odds are slim that many conservatives will opt to spend an evening watching actors dress up as Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube or express disingenuous shock that Rumsfeld is (or was) actually paid a salary for his efforts. Still, several of the jokes are clever enough to transcend party affiliation — “Just wait until 12 years from now, when Jenna Bush defeats Osama bin Laden for her dad” — and the sheer overall gutsiness of “Get Your War On” is a bracing reminder of just how toothless and timid political humor has become.“Hello, is this History?” one dispirited citizen asks into his ubiquitous phone. “You are gonna judge these people, right?” Mr. Rees and Rude Mechs have beaten history to the punch, passing a brutally partisan — and brutally funny — judgment of their own.“The Scene” until February 11 (307 W. 43rd St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-246-4422).“Get Your War On” until January 28 (59 E. 59th St., between Park and Madison avenues, 212-279-4200).

Stung by the Spotlight in ‘The Scene’

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