Summer can be a challenge for theater lovers like me. We’ve already seen the Broadway shows that have survived the traditional post-Tonys melt. And the big off-Broadway companies tend to shift into vacation mode, serving up the theatrical equivalent of whatever doesn’t require too much time in the kitchen.
So that means we’re left to the mercies of the smaller companies and the summer festivals. Sometimes we luck out as I did with the late spring holdovers Next Fall (which closes tonight) and The Temperamentals (which you’ve still got a chance to see before it closes on Aug. 23). More often, we don’t have much luck at all. The recent revival of Dreyfus in Rehearsal fell in the boggy middle. It’s interesting enough that I’m glad I saw it. But not enough so that I’d urge a friend to seek it out.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about the play is its back story. In 1974, Jean-Claude Grumberg, a French Jew whose Romanian-born father was deported and died in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote a bittersweet comedy about a Jewish amateur theater group putting on a play about the Dreyfus Affair.
The setting is Vilna, Poland, the time is 1931 and most members of the troupe find it difficult to connect to the anti-Semitism that caused the French Army to falsely accuse the Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus of treason 40 years earlier or to acknowledge the growing racial intolerance in their own time. Dreyfus in Rehearsal won France’s Prix du Syndicat de la critique for the best play of the year.
Later that fall, Garson Kanin (most famous for writing Born Yesterday, directing the original production of Funny Girl, co-writing the Tracy-Hepburn movies “Adam’s Rib” and “Pat and Mike” and having great marriages with Ruth Gordon until her death in 1985 and Marian Seldes until his death 1999) adapted the play for Broadway. The cast included Gordon, Sam Levene and a young Tovah Feldshuh. But something got lost in translation. It closed after just 12 performances.
This year’s revival was even less successful. It opened at the Beckett Theater on Sunday and closed last night, after just six performances. Dreyfus in Rehearsals draws broad stereotypes and both the director and the actors colored nicely within those lines. And there was poignancy at the end when, after an attack by some gentile thugs, the troupe dispersed to other cities and the audience could guess the fate of its various members by where they went. Still, I left feeling as though the play—and its jokes—might have been more at home at a community theater in Sun City.
But maybe not even there. For Dreyfus in Rehearsal reminded me—in setting and tone—of To Be or Not To Be, the poorly-received remake of the Ernst Lubitsch movie about a Polish theater troupe during World War II that Manhattan Theatre Club put on last fall, and The Singing Forest, Craig Lucas’ ill-conceived farce at the Public Theater this past spring. With the exception of Mel Brooks’ “Springtime for Hitler”, theatergoers just don’t seem ready to joke about the Holocaust. Or maybe it’s simply that if a show wants us to laugh to keep from crying about that horrendous time, then it’s got to be really, really funny.
In all honesty, Next Fall, the new play that opened this week at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, didn’t sound promising. First there is the title, the kind of bland, generic label that tells you absolutely nothing about the play. Then there is its confused marketing campaign which bounces between cutesy man-on-the street quotes about what people are planning to do next fall and a serious effort to position the play as a gay rights manifesto.
My theatergoing buddy Bill and I went to see it anyway. In part because it had been a while since we’d seen anything together. In part because the play is produced by Naked Angels, the theater cooperative that has spawned such terrific works in the past as Warren Leight’s Side Man and Jon Robin Baitz’s The Substance of Fire. And I'm happy to report that our going to see Next Fall turned out to be a very smart decision. Because it is one of the best new plays of the year.
Like so many contemporary plays, Next Fall is a drama about a dysfunctional family. Like far too few, it stretches out to encompass issues that are roiling the larger society. Lots of them. Like sexuality, love, friendship and faith.
The play opens in a hospital waiting room where family and friends have anxiously gathered after a car accident has put Luke, an aspiring actor and an evangelical Christian, into a coma. Flashbacks reveal Luke’s relationship with each of them, particularly with his lover Adam, a steadfast non-believer. Although they are committed to one another and live together, Luke believes that his sleeping with a man is a sin and the couple quarrel regularly over his inability to come out to his equally pious parents.
This is thought-provoking stuff. But playwright Geoffrey Nauffts, who is also the artistic director of Naked Angels, doesn’t forget that people come to the theater to be entertained as much as informed. Philosophical arguments are made but good jokes are also cracked—and the humor comes from who the characters are and isn’t just sugar coating slapped on to make the serious debate more palatable.
Some critics have been skeptical that such people could actually exist. They ask whether a fundamentalist Christian would live openly with his male lover. If an atheist could love such a fervent believer. And what would such a young hunk see in such a nebbishy older guy. Perhaps the situation doesn’t seem so unlikely to me because I have a good friend who is currently wrestling with many of these same issues. But I also buy it because Nauffts has created characters who come across as real human beings—sometimes annoying, sometimes endearing, just as we all are.
Most tellingly, his religious characters aren’t the usual one-note yokels who play the villains in so much of secular culture. Even the sanctimonious father, perhaps too pointedly named Butch, is a nuanced character, particularly as brought to life by Cotter Smith. In fact, the entire cast is pitch perfect and director Sheryl Kaller, aided by Wilson Chin’s versatile set and Jeff Croiter’s smart lighting, keeps the action flowing as smoothly as can be done in the theater’s intimate space.
But what I liked best is that Nauffts refuses to settle for easy answers to the difficult questions he poses. The Far Right has held serious discussion about faith hostage for over 20 years now and this play is seeking to free it. You don’t have to be a believer to appreciate that. You don’t have to be or even know someone gay to be moved by this play. But if you believe in smart and meaningful theater, you just should make an effort to see Next Fall. Fortunately, its run has just been extended through July 5.
Summer can be a challenge for theater lovers like me. We’ve already seen the Broadway shows that have survived the traditional post-Tonys melt. And the big off-Broadway companies tend to shift into vacation mode, serving up the theatrical equivalent of whatever doesn’t require too much time in the kitchen.
