The Whale, a play about a 600 lb. man eating himself to
death, won Samuel D. Hunter a spot high on the leaderboard of hot young playwrights.
But I was so simultaneously fascinated and repulsed when I saw it at Playwrights Horizons
two seasons ago that I asked my theatergoing buddy Bill to write the post about
it (click here to read what he wrote).
Still, I was really curious about what Hunter would do
next. The answer for New York theatergoers is The Few, which opened this week
at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater.
Hunter has all the hip credentials, including degrees from NYU, The Iowa Playwrights
Workshop and Juilliard. But he grew up in northern Idaho, went to fundamentalist
Christian schools and is interested in the kinds of outside-the-mainstream folks
that many other playwrights overlook (click here to read an interview with him).
Like The Whale, The Few aims to treat its characters and their story without
condescension or sentimentality. But, alas, this time out, Hunter is less successful.
His central figure is Bryan, an ex-trucker who gave up the
road, started a magazine filled with soulful essays about the long-distance
life and then abandoned it and his girlfriend QZ to take off for parts unknown.
During his four-year absence, QZ has kept the magazine going by downsizing the
poetry and depending instead on personals ads and on Matthew,
a gay teen who's become an all-around gofer and defacto little brother.
When the lights come up (they stalled at the opening night
performance my friend Priscilla and I attended) Bryan has suddenly reappeared
in the crummy trailer that serves as the publication’s office and over the next
95 minutes the three of them struggle with integrating him back into their
lives in a succession of scenes that each ends with a blackout.
The theme of small people with big dreams and an aching need
to connect to someone else is underscored repeatedly, especially in a series of
phone calls that are supposed to be coming from people wanting to place ads
seeking companionship.
The first two or three calls, all heard over the answering machine speaker, are mildly amusing but the
device quickly loses its charm. I wanted to rip the phone cord out of the wall
long before Bryan eventually tries to do it during one of those drunk scenes
that playwrights seem to throw in whenever they’re looking for easy laughs or a
convenient way for a character to expose exposition-required secrets.
Still, the actors commit fully. Michael Laurence is
appropriately intense as Bryan. Tasha Lawrence combines just the right mix of wounded
pride and wary desire that defines women like QZ. Meanwhile, Gideon Glick, a
master of the offbeat line reading, is appealingly quirky as Matthew.
And, given the limited space and budget that the Rattlestick
can provide, director Davis McCallum does what he can to keep the action moving
along. The problem is that the play doesn’t seem to know where it
wants to go. Hunter clearly feels for his characters but too many decisions are made for the sake of the plot, instead of
for the sake of the people within the plot.
Nevertheless, the opening night audience, filled with family
and friends (including the hip composer Nico Muhly who was also at another
downtown show I saw the previous night) was noisily supportive. I’m not so sure, though,
that a less connected audience would be.
As for me, I may have been underwhelmed by The Few but nobody bats 1000 and even this misfire displays enough of Hunter's empathetic gifts that I'm again looking forward to seeing what he does next
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