Wild Animals You Should Know (Has anyone seen this?)

[breathyfemalevocal]

Posted: 11/5/11 at 12:33pm

If you've seen Wild Animals You Should Know at MCC (previews started last night, 11/4) please share your thoughts and reviews.

How was Alice and how significant is her role?

Please be sure to label *SPOILERS* because I'm scheduled to see this later and don't want to know specific details.

Thanks.

[Candice Malkin]

Posted: 11/5/11 at 5:10pm

I have tickets the middle of November and I also want to know if anyone saw this yet.

[dshnookie]

Posted: 11/5/11 at 6:02pm

I'm seeing it next Saturday, and will be happy to report back if no one sees it between now and then.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 11/5/11 at 10:43pm

I saw this tonight and am sad to say it was not very good. Alice Ripley has NO role. In the hour and forty minutes I felt she maybe had 10 minutes of stage time. Having purchased a ticket to see her I was fairly disappointed.

The play itself is pretty terrible. I hadn't a clue about the plot going in. It dealt with a couple of boy scouts and their scout master *SLIGHT SPOILER* who the boys learn is gay.

The lead boy is so completely unlikeable and unbelievable it's hard to figure out his motivations and intentions. Gideon Glick, who plays his gay friend boy scout friend, affects his voice in such a way that he sounds seven or eight years old. I spent the first part of the play trying to figure out what age they were actually supposed to be.

I guess Patrick Breen fares best, but really no one is able to rise about the material. You could tell the audience wanted to laugh and enjoy themselves, but they seemed to lose interest attempting to pay attention. I really wanted to like this one and couldn't.

Updated On: 11/6/11 at 10:43 PM

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 12:10am

Flat, muddled, underdeveloped, and uninteresting. It's like a car stuck in the mud whose wheels keep spinning and still goes nowhere. Alice Ripley is wasted in a nothing part.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 12:14am

I just spoke to someone who saw it tonight and pretty much said the exact same thing, After Eight.

[binau]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 12:14am

Very sad. But at least Ripley is still saving her voice :P.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 12:23am

I was hoping for Ripley to have a part similar to what Linda Lavin has in "The Lyons." I wanted a juicy, bitchy mother she could sink her teeth into and let the barbs fly. This role is so throwaway it's almost an insult they would expect her to play it!

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 12:26am

Does Ripley have some sort of connection to the playwright? I'm wondering if this is a "favor" project for her.

[Bettyboy72]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 1:10am

If anything it keeps her working in a small show she can rest her voice in. She was probably dying to do something where the show doesn't hinge on her after all the hate she got for missing shows in N2N.

She's probably enjoying herself.

[Jordan Catalano]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 1:19am

How's her understudy?

[adamgreer]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 1:22am

Is there nudity in the production? In her broadway.com video, Ripley mentioned the play opened with some kind of sex scene.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 8:41am

One of the characters strips down to his underwear, but is never nude. The play begins with a webcam strip tease, but I wouldn't call it a sex scene.

[RuprechtJr.]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 10:16am

I was there last night too, Whizzer. I'm kind of on the fence about the show. I thought there were really good moments in the play that really land, and of course others that didn't. I feel like a lot of the laughs didn't happen because the actors didn't time it right. When we did laugh, it was in the middle of the joke. Then the end of the joke came, the actors waited for a laugh, and nothing.

I felt like all the dialogue was good and natural, nothing forced, and the actors all did a great job. My only complaint was Jay Armstrong Johnson was trying a bit too hard to be a cocky teenager. Sometimes it was spot on and sometimes it was a caricature. As for Gideon, his voice has always been, and probably always will be in that register. He added a slight nasal quality to give it a bit of "nerd" but I didn't feel like he sounded seven. The towering "DQ Man" John Behlmann played the scoutmaster with a secret. When he had his scene with Jay it was creepy because the height difference actually made it appear (then, and only then) that Jay was sixteen.

I thought the scene between Roger and Gideon was great, except that I completely lost interest at the tail-end of it. Gideon's story was touching, and then for some reason I stopped listening as their words fell apart. I only started paying attention again when the scene change music jolted me.

*SPOILERS*

The fight scene between Roger and Jay was the only scene (next to the final scene) I truly enjoyed Jay's performance. He lost his shell of a cocky ass, and became the monster he truly is. There are only a few moments in a few plays that widen my eyes, send a chill down my spine, and make me feel the literal gravity of what's going on and push me back in my seat. This scene was one of those moments.

The last five minutes of the show were the most touching. Alice's best moment in the show was the look she gave to Jay as she silently creeped in the room and set a birthday cupcake on his bed, paused and walked away, almost afraid of her son. You could see the hurt in Jay's eyes after that as he started to break down. Then he spots his ex-scoutmaster in the window of the house adjacent and begins to strip for him. The crescendoing ticking clock was kind of cheesy because it felt like it was literally telling us "something's about to happen!" like the rumbling before a scare in all the "Paranormal Activity" movies. But, it was effective. And having Jay come back out to bow with only his shorts on felt a little like they were saying "Ladies and gentlemen, here's Jay Armstrong Johnson shirtless ONE MORE TIME!!!" They definitely know who their audience is. 90% were gay couples and horny old ladies.

All in all, the play was decent but I would only see it again after some work. There was barely any development, so we were left to just hold on and wait for something through a lengthy middle. And then we sort of get some development through Gideon's story, but Jay remains an evil little runt with no reason for his actions. Alice Ripley was underused, true, but I felt her scenes weren't unimportant. Just spread out too far. And I think Alice and I share clumsiness and bad depth perception. Everything she held she dropped, or anytime she would gently toss something it would never land where she wanted it too, always on the floor. After a while you could see on her face that she was getting frustrated. Once she pointed to a pair of pajama pants that fell on the floor and furrowed her eyebrows and it looked like she mouthed "really?"

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 11:42am

It's an INSULT to Alice Ripley? Seriously? Get off your fangirl high horse, much better actors have done well with far less. You sound like those teen Idiots who whined about how boring iHo was because they bought tickets to see Michael Esper in his underwear. It's not the play's fault that you went for narrow-minded reasons.

[buddy 11432]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 2:44pm

Sunday's Times has an ad for 'Wild Animals You Should Know' with a picture of Jay Armstrong Johnson that will certainly sell some tickets. Sorry to read the play is not very good.

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 6:01pm

I feel Whizzer was justified in being disappointed in Alice Ripley's part, both with respect to how small it was, and how poor it was. I was disappointed myself, as were others who made similar comments to that effect after the show. I feel it was perfectly reasonable to expect her not to have so negligible a part.

As for other actors doing better with far less, I can't think of anyone who has done anything better--quality-wise-- with far less, since far less than this is less than zero.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 11/6/11 at 11:01pm

Thanks for the backup After Eight. Yes I bought my ticket because of Alice, but that doesn't mean I'm a crazy fangirl teen idiot. Are you telling me you never went to see a show or movie solely to check out an actor you enjoy? (For the record I used "almost an insult" in jest. I realize it's a job and what not. I was simply expressing my disappointment in the size and scope of her role.)

Regardless of the size of her role, if the play had been better, I would have enjoyed it. I didn't base my liking of the production on Ms. Ripley alone. Far from it. Yes she played a role in selling me my ticket, but I went to experience the play as a whole, and for me it stunk.

[orangeskittles]

Posted: 11/7/11 at 1:50am

After Eight- Judi Dench won an Oscar for 6 minutes of screen time.

I haven't seen the show, so I can't comment on its quality, but after Whizzer's rant, I couldn't help but be reminded of the adage "There are no small parts, only small actors."

[After Eight]

Posted: 11/7/11 at 2:12am

That was the point I was making. Yes, length-wise, Judi Dench did better with far less, but quality-wise her part offered far more. And yes, she is a better actress than Alice Ripley, and most everybody else, for that matter.

But if Judi Dench had given the same performance in a play, being the biggest star in the cast, I think audiences would have felt equally frustrated and shortchanged by the brevity of her appearance.

To a degree, that's how I felt about Alan Rickman's less than starring part in Seminar, a longer ahd better part than Ripley's, and yet still not central or sizable enough for an actor of his stature and gifts.
Updated On: 11/7/11 at 02:12 AM

[thismyshow]

Posted: 11/7/11 at 2:13am

i might go see this just because the DQ guy is in it lol

[ahhrealmonsters]

Posted: 11/7/11 at 7:32am

Just echoing what everyone else has said: it's a pretty bad play, and Alice has a tiny part. For those of you hoping she's resting her voice, she does scream in the show.

[themysteriousgrowl]

Posted: 11/8/11 at 10:20am

It's a waste of 100 minutes of your minutes, and it feels like a waste of 150 of them. Yes, Alice Ripley's role is small and thankless. She has the least stage time, and if you didn't know it was her or that she was notable beyond the size of this role, the character would make no impression whatsoever. Patrick Breen, as Whizzer said, fares best by managing to not embarass himself, but it takes him awhile to get there. By the end, he's made an impression but treaded (trod?) a lot of water to get there.

The entire cast has been directed to (or been allowed to?) perform as sitcom-ily as possible, perhaps because the writing is sitcom-y, but since the central drama is so poorly written, it can't work as a style piece, either. Glick is an obnoxious cartoon (imagine his geek character from SPIDER-MAN given 30 times more lines), and Jay Armstrong Johnson is, yes, a caricature... though, again, it's hard to know where the fault lies, as playwright Thomas Higgins not only has no ear for natural dialogue, but also (and especially) seems to have never heard a teenager speak in his life -- and definitely not a teenager of 2011.

Throughout, you feel like something might actually happen. You keep waiting for it. A couple of revelations are made, but this production hasn't decided what this play is about. It's not about scoutmaster's secret (or what ultimately happens to him), though much of the first 60 minutes is spent there. Towards the end, the focus shifts to the troubling narcissism of Armstrong's character, but it's too late in the game to ask us to care about something that, until that point, has only been resource for bad one-off jokes. It's not about the relationship between Glick and Armstrong, although that's what opens the play and is revisited throughout, and it's not about the relationship between Amstrong and the parentals -- or at least not believably so because all three of those relationships are so ill-defined. Families who don't understand each other as well as they think and famiilies with communication problems often make for good drama, but do these people even live in the same house?

And if all of this were the point, if the meandering were intentional, if the playwright were giving us snapshots, an impressionistic picture of this set of characters at this particular moment in time, in this set of circumstances, perhaps a thoughline could be found, but that's not this play, and that's definitely not this production of this play. It wants to be about all of these things and ends up being about none of them. It's got a definitive setup that gets tossed away halfway through, sketchily drawn characters, hackey jokes that aren't funny, and absolutely zero sense of purpose or focus. Toward the beginning especially, the actors performed with an energy level hovering somethwhere around 2 or 3. By the end, it was clear why -- the piece lacks an engine.

The play's final monent **SPOILER ALERT** gets J.A.J. in his underwear for the second time, this time stripping for the scoutmaster rather than his best friend, but in terms of WTF? endings, it's a doozy. It's got nothing to do, thematically or dramatically, with anything that came before it... or if it does, the play gives us no indication -- or even options -- of what we might take away from it.

There's potential in some of the ideas here ,but even a broken clock is right twice a day. Luckily for me, I was able to wash this junk out of my brain the following afternoon with SONS OF THE PROPHET, which was really and truly very wonderful. Even after all the positive word-of-mouth, reviews, superlatives here on the board, it fully met and -- more often -- exceeded all expectations. Much of it is still ringing in my head, and I keep replaying moments of each wonderful performance over and over -- a perfect production of an exceptional piece of writing.

[CCalamuso]

Posted: 11/11/11 at 8:00am

I saw the play last night and I thought it was great.. The actors were excellent and the story line strong... Alice's role wasnt major but seeing her do anything for any amount of time is worth every penny.. I would recommend this play.

[someone.else's.story2]

Posted: 11/15/11 at 7:59pm

I would go just to see Ripley, if only I were in NYC. Oh well...