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.
CHURCH DOOR TOUCAN GAY MARKETING PUPPIES MUSICAL THEATER STAPLES PERIOD OIL BITCHY SNARK HOLES
