Woody’s New Family Affair
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Like some mythic watery creature, vast and ancient, the familiar contours of the story float into view. A young man tries to make his way in America. But he’s torn between family obligation and his heart’s desires. His father, too, had to choose between family and a dream of love; his mother, between family and a dream of art. In
America we have to make these painful choices: That is the eternal lesson of the monster in the murky deep.
Only this time, when the monster pokes above the surface, it has a bra on its head, lipstick on its collar, and a guilty look on its monster face. Because this time the story is by Woody Allen.
You might think Mr. Allen would tweak the old formula, so familiar from Odets, Miller, and others, to get some laughs. Wouldn’t that be something to see? But his jester’s motley continues to accumulate dust. In “A Secondhand Memory,” which opened last night at the Atlantic, Mr. Allen instead continues his long fixation with family, specifically marriage, specifically its pointless, life-sapping, soul-crushing, happiness-massacring aspects.
There is a long pedigree for this treatment, of course, particularly on the stage. Happy-weddings-and-unhappy-marriages is a theme linking everyone from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Edward Albee. Still, Mr. Allen pursues it a little mercilessly. There are four marriages in his play, none successful. The only people who don’t complain about their miserable situation are the ones who haven’t realized how miserable they are just yet. The only hope is to philander, which every man in the play does to one extent or another. This is the Kama Sutra of cheating.
It’s 1950s Brooklyn, and a young, striving Jewish kid named Eddie Wolfe (Nicky Katt) is stuck. His father (Dominic Chianese) was robbed by his business partners, so he had to return from an ascendant career in Hollywood to help at the jewelry shop. Eddie has entered a snap marriage with Bea (Kate Blumberg), who is already expecting. But he’s not happy, and neither is his father, and neither is his mother (Beth Fowler).
His rich Uncle Phil (Michael McKean), seems happy. He’s a hot Hollywood agent with a hot young wife, Diane (Erica Leerhsen). But this happiness only comes after he dumps the old wife, and before he discovers that he’s been sharing the new one with his nephew. It wouldn’t be a Woody Allen script without one dash of the really, really gross.
Pointedly, the person who seems happiest with her love life is Alma (Elizabeth Marvel), Eddie’s big sister and the black sheep of the family. She hasn’t donned the marriage shackles just yet. Instead she leads the life of a sexual buccaneer, making a steady conquest of Europe. Alma turns up in the dreams of her relatives, and in soliloquies to the audience. She’s a writer in search of experiences, the teller of the tale.
All its pathologies aside, the tale turns out to be pretty compelling. It takes forever to get going, and often rings false. Still it has sharp moments. “Everybody means well but somehow life doesn’t work out,” somebody says, and the play’s best moments bear this out. Mr. Allen takes an agreeably unsentimental approach to his characters. The dark, abrupt ending leaves you with a little jolt of despair. And when toting up the pluses and minuses of the new play, some account must be made of the seriously lackluster production.
Woody Allen, the seasoned play wright, should have fired the greenhorn director, Woody Allen. Though he knows his way around a camera, Mr. Allen only began directing for the stage last year with his pair of comic one acts, “Writer’s Block.” His directing there was sufficient. Here, the inexperience proves deadly. The pace seems off, the staging strained, and his work with the actors wholly lacking.
Mr. Chianese has shown real acting chops lately, both as Uncle Junior in “The Sopranos” and in supporting roles in the starry “Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” and “Much Ado About Nothing” in Central Park last summer. As the lonely, seething patriarch of the Wolfe clan, he looks lost. Not just wrong for the role, but lost. Mr. Katt fares only a little better. He doesn’t flail, as Mr. Chianese does, but doesn’t give the play a magnetic center. I note that he, too, is short on stage credits.
Ms. Fowler does her customary solid work here as Fay, the frustrated actress-turned-matron, and Ms. Leerhsen proves capable as the canny socialist-secretary-turned-society-wife. A pleasant surprise comes from Mr. McKean, who has strayed a long way from Spinal Tap. He’s in total command as the slimy Uncle Phil, domineering but vulnerable.
His performance also reveals one of the shortcomings in the script.
Mr. McKean isn’t some melodramatic lug of an actor. If a writer sends even a puff of comic material into his sails, he’ll go hurtling forward. Mr. Allen has chance after chance to give the show some levity, but he willfully, almost perversely, lets them pass. I’m not one to tell Woody Allen his business where writing jokes is concerned. Still, when Eddie visits Uncle Phil’s office, and he keeps stopping to answer his phone, the interruptions beg for some kind of schtick. It’s like he’s not even trying.
Holding the show together, in a black turtleneck and dark ponytail, is Lily Tomlin. Or at least it seems to be the young Ms. Tomlin, lending Alma her spunky accent and I-know-a-secret air. Actually it’s just Ms. Marvel, being her usual effortlessly terrific self. She lets you sense the heartache behind her tough-girl declarations of how great life is on the road. Those moments are a sign, maybe, that there’s more in this play than its overmatched director has ferreted out.
Until January 25 (336 W. 20th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 212-239-6200).