Sermonizing and Satire Uneasily Collide in ‘The Balusters’

It’s getting harder to practice identity politics these days. More than a year into President Trump’s second term, there’s a sense among many on both the right and the left, not to mention in the larger but generally quieter center, that social justice battles haven’t always provided practical results for the people they’re supposed to serve.In his new play, a contemporary comedy of manners called “The Balusters,” which has opened at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, David Lindsay-Abaire tries to send up the inefficiency and hypocrisy of some warriors on this front while stressing the need for more of the progress they seek. The Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright would appear as well-suited as anyone to the task: With modern favorites such as “Kimberly Akimbo,” “Rabbit Hole,” and “Fuddy Meers,” he has previously revealed both a sharp, whimsical sense of humor and an enormous heart.It’s never easy to reconcile preaching with satire, though, and unfortunately, “Balusters” seems more concerned about reinforcing lessons that will sit comfortably with a Broadway audience than taking a candid look at the issues and conflicts it addresses. Ostensibly, the message here is that most of us, regardless of age, race, gender, creed, or other factors used as dividing lines, are doing the best that we can, a notion that certainly jibes with the generosity of spirit that Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has consistently shown.By the time this nearly two-hour, one-act play has run its course, however, representatives of certain groups appear to be doing better than others, and their own capacities for generosity and other virtues tend to be proportional to how much those groups are still set upon or struggling, at least by progressive measures.“Balusters” unfolds in a handsome home, stylishly represented in Derek McLane’s scenic design, recently acquired by a black couple, Kyra and Leon, in a wealthy enclave in a more economically diverse East Coast city. We never meet Leon, an intellectual property lawyer, but Kyra is quickly established as the play’s heroine, if not its wisest or most saintly character; those superlatives fall to her housekeeper, Luz, a working-class Filipina, whom we’ll get to shortly.Kyra, wittily played by Anika Noni Rose, a fabulous actress and singer who should be a bigger star, has relocated with her husband and their twin daughters from Baltimore, where she worked in corporate finance and got into some initially unspecified trouble with neighbors. She has nonetheless agreed to serve on the board of the neighborhood association in her new community, though as she prepares for her first meeting, she recounts some anxious advice: “Leon was like, ‘Don’t say too much tonight, we want to fit in with these people.’”These people, revealed to us over a series of meetings, turn out to be a fairly eclectic bunch, and director Kenny Leon has enlisted a group of accomplished troupers to give them life. There’s Brooks Duncan, a gay black man played with winning wryness by Carl Clemons-Hopkins, who will bond with Kyra on various points and serve on a traffic and safety committee she forms in order to get stop signs installed at a dangerous intersection.Kyra finds a less likely ally, at least on that committee, in Ruth Ackerman, an older Jewish woman who enters wearing a fur coat, primarily to annoy another member who’s a vegan. Played by a tastily sardonic Margaret Colin, Ruth makes inappropriate remarks throughout the play, at one point wondering aloud why Kyra didn’t get a black maid. “It would’ve evened the score a little bit,” Ruth proposes, noting, “Why do you think my housekeepers are always German?”Then there’s Melissa Han, an Asian-American lesbian played by a tart Jeena Yi, who’s meticulously tolerant but mistakes Luz for Kyra’s mother-in-law, forgetting she has met her at another neighbor’s house. Others, including Kyra, fail to retain details about Luz’s own life, in spite of their self-conscious graciousness, and in the latter role, an excellent Maria-Christina Oliveras stalks the stage in the background or between scenes, as if judging or haunting them.Alan Kirby, a middle-aged white man, has a comical monologue, nicely managed by Michael Esper, in which he basically laments wokeness, confusing Harvey Fierstein with Harvey Weinstein in the process. But the principal villain in “Balusters” is an older white guy: Elliot Emerson, a real estate executive and the association’s president, who has a dark history with Luz, and who is revealed to be not only reactionary but corrupt.Though fleshed out as much as possible by the always superb Richard Thomas, Elliot is a caricature of backwards thinking, ultimately inspiring our pity but not our empathy. In a climactic showdown, he shares old pictures of the community with Kyra, and she notices the lack of racial diversity. “I’ve worked for decades to more fully integrate this neighborhood,” he protests, to which she responds, “Yes, you’ve let in some of us good ones.” Meaning exactly what, I wondered? People who could afford to buy houses there? People who played golf?In the end, “The Balusters” left me even more grateful for the work of artists like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins who in recent years has gifted Broadway with “Appropriate” and “Purpose,” both fiercer and funnier in their accounts of racism and other social challenges that undeniably linger. Compared to those plays, this new one is, for all its good intentions, pretty weak tea.

Sermonizing and Satire Uneasily Collide in ‘The Balusters’

Sermonizing and Satire Uneasily Collide in ‘The Balusters’

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