A Grumpy Response to "Happy Now?"

The folks at Primary Stages decided to celebrate their 25th anniversary by dedicating the season to female playwrights.  And you’ve got to give them credit for going beyond the usual suspects. They haven’t staged any Lillian Hellman revivals, Yasmina Reza leftovers or yet another quickie whipped up by Theresa Rebeck.  

Instead, over the past six months, the company has presented a Cusi Cram comedy that's driven by the prickly relationship between two sisters and Charlayne Woodard's one-woman show about a childless woman's relationships with other people's children. And last night, it rounded out the season with Happy Now?, an import by the British playwright Lucinda Coxon about a woman with a demanding job, difficult parents and a needy husband and kids.  I liked the first, missed the second and was totally turned off by the third.

Call me heartless.  Or a traitor to the sisterhood.  But I’ve had it with books, movies or plays where women discover that it’s tough to juggle their personal and professional lives.  D’uh?  And if a writer insists on working this well tilled soil, then she ought to try to come up with some fresh insights.  Instead what we get in Happy Now? is the same old same old we’ve seen countless times before.  In fact, I saw almost the exact same thing a couple of months ago when Playwrights Horizons mounted Melissa James Gibson’s This.

Just as in that also blandly named play, the plot of Happy Now? pivots around whether or not its female protagonist will or won’t have an affair to spice up her humdrum bourgeois life. The women in both plays have smart, quippy friends, wine-stoked dinner parties and the de rigueur gay best friend who is so faithful and, for all intents and purposes, asexual, that’s he’s always available to babysit whenever there’s a family crisis.

The cast in Happy Now?, lead by Mary Bacon as the frazzled heroine, is fine, particularly CJ Wilson in an entertaining turn as the would-be Lothario. Director Liz Diamond has found smart ways to turn the limited space at 59E59 Theaters to the play’s advantage. And I’ve no complaints about the technical team either. But I would still rather get a root canal without novocaine than sit through another two hours of a play like this one.

Of course, I know that one woman’s "too much" can be another woman’s "not enough." Coxon, who’s enjoyed a successful stage and screen career, says she wrote the play because its story “was nowhere to be found on stage.” (Click here to read an interview she gave London’s The Independent last year.)  My friend Joy laughed out loud all during the first act. And Coxon’s play was a hit in London last year and sold out its run at the National Theater.

Most of the New York reviewers loved This and the big-boy critics Charles Isherwood of the New York Times and John Simon at Bloomberg.com have kind things to say about Happy Now? too. But both shows just got on my nerves. I mean don't women—and women playwrights in particular—have more to say than this? 

Maybe it’s because I don’t have kids.  Or because most of my gay male friends are in decades-long relationships and have active social and sexual lives of their own. Or because the very busy women I know just suck it up and get on with doing what they have to do. But all this yuppie whining just makes me grumpy. 

Why "This" is Not for Me

The term “comedy of manners” doesn’t get used much nowadays.  But that seems the best way to describe, This, the new play by Melissa James Gibson that’s currently in previews at Playwrights Horizons.  Except that This didn’t amuse me at all.  And that’s not just because one of its characters refers to blogs as “a large accumulation of snot.”   I can take that kind of joke.  What I can’t take is pretentious self-indulgence.  And This is full of that.

This (and what’s up with that title?) centers around a group of artsy thirtysomethings who have been friends since college and are finally dragging themselves into adulthood—two have just had a baby, another wants a more meaningful job, the fourth, and central character, is being forced to grow up by recent widowhood. Sure, they’re the hyper self-involved types we used to call yuppies but a good play could be made from such people and situations and several have been, including Gina Gionfriddo’s Becky Shaw and Adam Bock’s The Drunken City. 

But while those works found fresh ways to look at familiar characters, Gibson fills her play with the shallow stereotypes and predictable ready quips of a middling TV sitcom. I had thought the pudgy, wisecracking gay friend who has no sex life of his own and is around solely to lend support to his great-looking and totally randy straight friends had gone out with shoulder pads. But he’s center stage in This and no matter how nicely played by Glenn Fitzgerald, is indicative of how superficial this show is.

Gibson pays so little attention to the plot that the characters lurch from scene to scene without rhyme or reason. The play offers two bi-racial couples and one bisexual guy.  But it doesn’t explore how either of these things affects the people involved. And it isn’t helped by Gibson's frequent collaborator Daniel Aukin, who directs the show in a similarly helter-skelter manner. The last scene has a monologue that is supposed to be an epiphany but instead wallows in totally unearned sentimentality.

Even the set is misguided.  Louisa Thompson has designed an elaborate loft apartment to be the home of a couple in the play.  It’s well appointed with a piano (she’s a musician) a work studio (he’s a carpenter) and floor to ceiling bookshelves (they’re both intellectuals).  Problem is only half of the play takes place there so the actors have to haul furniture around each time the scene changes to simulate other locations even though the loft is always visible.  Which just looks silly when two of the characters are supposed to be sitting on a park bench eating ice cream cones.

I could go on but somehow it seems bad manners to say more.