Addison--you took David Hyde-Pierce's monologue at face value. There was an additional level you missed, in which Durang was, as Kad said, revealing that the people who rail against modernity spend so much energy railing against what is changing that they fail to live in the present.
What distinguishes Durang's writing--and it has never been better than in this play--is the level of artifice: the characters are experiencing traumatic emotion but expressing it, as best they can, in cliches and formalities that comment on those emotions comically. So there is a wink between audience and actor: "We both know I'm saying something silly now, but we agree not to forget that I'm really upset, okay?"
In the hands of bad actors (or actors unable to play off these multiple levels simultaneously), it seems stilted or artificial or unfunny.
But in the hands of a cast like this, it is theatrical magic. This play plumbs depths that most of his plays haven't, because Durang, now in his fifties, is dealing with aging, as is his longtime pal Sigourney Weaver, who has been appearing in his plays since her early twenties, and Kristine Nielsen and David Hyde-Pierce have also done his plays before. So they all share the same comic vision, and the same realization that our lives are the sum total of what we've done and haven't done with them. with little or no possibility left of great change.
That's why Kristine Nielsen's performance is so, so, SO good. For the first act, she is hysterically and self-indulgently stuck in her self-pity...and then that phone call...THAT PHONE CALL! It is among the best performances of a monologue or soliloquy I have ever seen in a lifetime of theatergoing.
I'm so glad I saw it. I really wish it was moving. I hope the next time it is performed, it is performed as well as this was.
