"The Receptionist" Revival Misses Its Call

 

Shows get revived for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they were under appreciated in the past. Or they may have something particularly relevant to say about current events. A director may have come up with an innovative way to tell the old story. Or a producer may believe that a familiar comfort-food title will sell tickets. And sometimes a star wants to take a crack at an iconic role, to give a boost to a favorite one or just to try something different from what they've done before.

As its name suggests, the Second Stage theater company was created to do revivals that would give living American playwrights a second chance to get their work onto a New York stage. And right now 2ndStage, as it likes to bill itself, is having a terrific success with a star-studded revival of Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo’s 2009 Pulitzer finalist centered around a bad blind date and the interlocking network of unhappy people connected to it. I had a terrific time at this dark comedy, liking it even more than I did when I first saw it back in 2008 (click here to read my earlier review).  

And it isn't just me who's feeling that way either. This new Becky Shaw has picked up nominations for Best Revival from the Drama Desk, the Outer Critics Circle and the Tony nominators. The New York Drama Critics Circle gave its Best Individual Performance award to the production’s star Alden Ehrenreich.

Meanwhile, I was looking forward to seeing what the company would do with The Receptionist, a cautionary tale by Adam Bock that shook me when I saw it in 2007 with Jayne Houdyshell in the title role and that is now being revived with the two-time Tony winner Katie Finneran. You wouldn’t normally expect to see the easy-going Houdyshell and the high-spirited Finneran going up for the same role but I figured it would be fun to see what different choices such very different actors might make.  

The Receptionist, which opened at the Pershing Square Signature Center this week, is set in the kind of brightly-lit and blandly decorated office that might serve as the gathering spot in a TV sitcom. Its titular character, a woman named Beverly, would fit right into that kind of show too. She’s the office busybody, nudge, and self-appointed social activities organizer. 

When the play opens her boss is unusually late but that means that Beverly and her co-worker Lorraine have more time to gossip. When a man from the central office arrives, Beverly tries to cover for the boss’ absence. Lorraine flirts with the guy. So far, so sitcom. But then about a third of the way into this tight 80-minute play one of them makes a casual comment about a recent meeting that sends the whole thing careening into the kind of storyline that might turn up on an episode of the sci-fi series “Black Mirror.”

The two things I remember most from seeing The Receptionist in 2007 was how knocked out I was by Houdyshell’s performance and how shaken I was by the growing sense of unease as it became clearer to me what the business of the office was and how easy it can be for nice, likeable people to do really horrible things. Alas, I didn’t feel any of that while watching this revival. 

Finneran is a very gifted comedienne and director Sarah Benson gives the actress plenty of room to do what she does best, which means lots of little bits of comic business that drew big laughs from the audience at the performance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I attended (click here to read an interview with the actress). But Finneran seemed a lot less sure of herself as the tone shifted into more serious territory and our view of Beverly becomes more complicated. And that unbalanced the whole evening for me.

The play itself is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago when the recent wounds of 9/11 had the country debating how far the government should go to keep Americans safe, what the definition of safety should be and how much responsibility each of us should bear for the actions taken to secure it. With its emphasis on the humor that admittedly was always there, this production makes it OK to smile and then look away, to pretend that things may not be as bad as they seem. It’s taken the cautionary out of the tale.

The Post-Modern Romance of "Becky Shaw"

Boy meets girl, boy loses girl is one of the most recognizable, reliable and fecund tropes in the theater. It is how the story plays out that can tell you a lot not only about a playwright but about the times that have helped shape his or her work. Judging from the several plays about modern romance my theatergoing buddy Bill and I have seen over the past year—Hunting and Gathering, The Drunken City, Reasons to be Pretty—our time seems to be feeling decidedly unromantic about romance. Love, says one of the characters in Becky Shaw, the new post-modern romantic comedy currently playing at the Second Stage Theatre, is “doing stuff that you don’t want to do.”

Becky Shaw was written by Gina Gionfriddo, a writer for TV’s “Law & Order” shows and the author of After Ashley, a trenchant social comedy about fame that had a short but acclaimed run at the Vineyard Theatre four seasons ago. Gionfriddo’s new work about a quartet of star-crossed lovers was last year’s hit at the Humana Festival of New American Plays that is held each spring at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and the minute I read about it, I started lighting candles for it to come to New York.

It’s arrived with the same director, Peter DuBois, and two of the original cast members—Annie Parisse, who plays the title character; and David Wilson Barnes, who plays the central character, a cynic named Max. And the show's newcomers—Thomas Sadoski, terrific in the off-Broadway production of Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty; Emily Bergl, an engaging spitfire; and the always wonderfully astringent Kelly Bishop—are just as intriguingly offbeat.

The play does get off to a somewhat slow and slightly confusing start. Parisse’s Becky doesn’t even show up until the middle of the first act. But the acting is smart throughout, Gionfriddo’s lines are laugh-out-loud funny and it’s hard not to have a good time. Even though that’s the last thing you’d be doing if you found yourself in the situations the characters face as they try to sort through their romantic entanglements and financial woes.

As many reviewers have pointed out, there’s an apparently intentional connection between the title character and Becky Sharp, the pointy-elbowed social climber in "Vanity Fair," William Makepeace Thackeray’s classic novel about 19th century British society. But I confess that although I have happy memories of reading the book alongside a pool during one winter vacation in Cancun, I wasn't able to draw the appropriate comparative lit parallels. (Although you can click here to read a CurtainUp exegesis that does exactly that.)

Maybe I was just too obsessed with the romantic stuff. For the characters in Becky Shaw don’t just enter relationships with baggage, they come with complete luggage sets. And the solace that Gionfriddo offers is as far from the old love-as-a-cure-all as you can get. Compromising your standards, she suggests, may be the best way to get a relationship. Lying—to your partner, to yourself—is probably the best way to keep it. Bishop’s character, the mother who is essentially the one true grown-up in the group, seems to sum up the philosophy when she urges everyone to stop worrying about their problems and instead just eat a nice dinner, accompanied by a good bottle of wine.

It’s a bleak take on love and yet, Bill and I felt surprisingly buoyant when we left the theater and walked down the street to have our own dinner and wine at Le Petit Un Deux Trois, which recently opened in the space that used to house the old Le Madeleine on the corner of 43rd and Ninth. Maybe tough-minded pragmatism is the best we can hope for in these unsettling times and so we’re particularly grateful when it comes leavened with a little humor: a tonic of sulfur mixed with molasses.

And Bill and I didn’t seem to be the only ones happy to quaff it down. “We’ve just seen the best play,” said one of the women who sat at the table next to us, obviously delighted to share the news. What?, we asked. She flashed us the Playbill of Becky Shaw.