I'M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 1/11/15 at 11:04pm

There are some actors whose magic makes it all look so damned easy. They don't put on a performance or create a character, they just inhabit circumstances so truthfully and with such intuition, intelligence, and ease that it illuminates the whole theater. Cherry Jones is one, Boyd Gaines is another and most definitely Reed Birney is another.

He is absolutely the main reason to see Halley Feiffer's problematic I'M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD, where Birney plays a legendary playwright whiling away the night with his daughter, who is anxiously awaiting a review of her performance in an off-Broadway production of THE SEAGULL. The first part of Feiffer's ninety minute play is more or less a monologue where Birney's character, David, holds court with a worshipful audience of one. On he rails about the theater, what it's become, and his adventures in the theatrical world of the mid-twentieth century. Feiffer's writing here is crisp as she crafts David into one of those dazzling monsters whose mercurial shifts in mood can cause whiplash. Seductive and playful one moment, chillingly vicious the next, David is irresistible, even when the playwright begins to strain credibility with his manipulations of his jumpy daughter. The conceits may ring a bit false, but Birney never does. He rips into David's lengthy monologues with the ferocity of a tiger. Life is a tour de force for David, who may be more performer than playwright and Feiffer's writing has a propulsive rhythm that

But something happens as the play goes along. You might want to hear a little more about Ella, David's insecure and worshipful daughter. I suppose its a storytelling technique that she hardly gets a word in edgewise to illustrate her love of the theatre, but it would have been nice. Who is this girl, anyway? Like Konstantin in THE SEAGULL, she's just an appendage of her narcissistic artist parent, but even Konstantin got a bit more characterization than Ella does in this play.

This nagging problem in the first part of the play amps up to eleven in the second part where Ella comes to the forefront of the story in the most unconvincing way and Betty Gilpin, the actress playing her, tries valiantly to put the pieces of the character together to make sense. For this last scene, I imagine Feiffer was trying to take one of those teary parent-child reconciliation scenes from five-hanky movies and plays too numerous to count and turn it on its ear, but she falls into the same trap they do: For all its edgy conceit, the ending of I'M GONNA PRAY...is as manipulative, false, and obvious as any sub-Hallmark weepie. Feiffer has talent, to be sure, but the ending of this play reeks of a writer who just got too much into her head.

But still...it may all be worth it just to see Reed Birney. Damn, that's an actor for you.