"The Wild Party" is Way Too Mild

Right before my husband K and I went to see the Encores! Off-Center production of Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party, I re-read the 1928 narrative poem on which the musical is based. I found it to be amusing, clever and surprisingly sexy. Alas, I didn’t find any of those qualities in the show, which ends its five-performances run at City Center tonight.

The poem was written by Joseph Moncure March, a Robert Frost protégé who was an early staffer at The New Yorker magazine, helped create its Talk of the Town section and had first hand-knowledge of the louche Jazz Age scene March’s poem describes.

The Wild Party's primary story centers around the beautiful and promiscuous vaudeville dancer Queenie and her boyfriend, a temperamental clown named Burrs.They’re the proverbial couple who can’t live with or without one another and that dangerous dynamic is played out in the titular soiree they host.

The book's guest list includes a bickering gay couple (barely acknowledged in the show), a dim-witted boxer and his floozy, a lesbian stripper and Queenie’s frenemy, a good-time gal named Kate who brings along a date named Mr. Black. He falls hard for Queenie. Trouble ensues when she finds herself falling for him too.

The poem's depiction of people who indulge freely in booze, drugs and all kinds of couplings was considered so scandalous when the book came out that it was banned in Boston, which gave it a brief cachet before it was largely forgotten.

But it became hot again in the 1990s when the poem, by then in the public domain, was republished with illustrations by the cartoonist Art Spiegelman and turned into two separate musicals by Lippa and Michael John LaChiusa.

Both composers did their own librettos (although George C. Wolfe helped with LaChiusa’s) but neither totally cracked the challenge of moving the poem from the page to the stage. Still, both versions debuted in the spring of 2000 and although neither was a hit, the score for each has developed cult status over the years (click here to read more about that). 

LaChiusa’s version, which had a brief run on Broadway, is usually considered more ambitious and expansive. But Lippa’s is seen as more accessible and the fact that his show was produced by Manhattan Theatre Club made it a perfect choice for the Encores! summer series which spotlights off-Broadway musicals. 

The unusually large number of twentysomethings who turned up in the audience for Thursday night's performance—and cheered loudly throughout it—suggests that Lippa's version has become a particularly revered totem for the new generation of musical theater geeks who probably discovered the cast album in high school and then cast themselves in the show once they got to college.

As always, Encores! has recruited big names for its production. Sutton Foster, decked out in a blonde wig and swanky gowns designed by Clint Ramos, plays Queenie. Steven Pasquale, looking heavier than I remember but still hunky, plays Burrs. And the rising star Brandon Victor Dixon completes the triangle as Mr. Black.

These are three of the best voices now in the business and the singing was uniformly terrific. The problem for me is that the actors are miscast and, perhaps because of the notoriously short rehearsal period for Encores! shows, haven’t figured out a way to compensate for that. And neither Leigh Silverman's turbid direction nor Sonya Tayeh's manic dance numbers give them any help.

There’s an intrinsic spunkiness in Foster that was evident even when she played the mutilated young woman in the revival of Violet that was part of the inaugural 2013 season of Encores! Off-Center. But Queenie, always desired for her beauty, bored with the life that it has brought her but afraid to change, is as far away from spunky as you can get and Foster shows none of her despair. Even the new curtain closer that Lippa has written for her fails to reveal it.

Burrs meanwhile is the classic creepy clown. He brutalizes Queenie one minute and clings desperately to her the next. Both Brian D’Arcy James in Lippa's original production and Mandy Patinkin in LaChiusa’s brought a scary volatility to the role but Pasquale plays Burrs straight down the middle, which saps the tension out of his relationship with Queenie and out of the show. Similarly, Dixon looks the part of the seductive Black but radiates no heat.

The best performances come from Joaquina Kalukango, who gives Kate an appropriately loose and bluesy sassiness, and Miriam Shor, the original Yitzhak in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, who stops the show with the lesbian’s lament for “An Old-Fashioned Love Story.”  Their moments brought some much needed pizazz to what otherwise turned out to be just a run-of-the-mill party.

"Of Good Stock" Isn't Quite Good Enough

You can’t say that Of Good Stock doesn’t aim to please. It’s set in a spacious Cape Cod vacation home that’s been appealingly designed and lit by Santo Loquasto and Peter Kaczorowski. Its characters—three sisters and their significant others—are the kind of attractive and witty folks who write cookbooks, enjoy comfortable trust funds and find Montana more exotic than Madagascar. 

Plus their sibling rivalries, relationship woes and unresolved parental issues are the kinds of problems that should hit home for just about anyone who’d find themself in the audience at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Center Stage space, where the show will finish out its run on July 26. 

It's all pleasant stuff and not a bad way to pass a summer evening but as you can probably tell, it didn’t totally please me. And that's because Of Good Stock seems to have a bad case of what my mother used to call being all dressed up with nowhere to go.

As the play opens, Jess Stockton, the eldest sister, and her husband Fred (he’s the food writer) are getting ready to host a weekend for her two younger siblings and the men in their lives at the family vacation home that Jess has recently inherited from her famous-author-but-otherwise-not-so-good-guy father.

It’s a significant weekend because Jess, still recovering from cancer, will be turning 41, a year older than her mother was when she died from the disease. Jess’ middle sister Amy, slated to get married in a few months, arrives in full bridezilla mode, while their baby sister Celia brings a new beau and a couple of secrets.

What follows are the predictable blowups and make ups, spiced up with lots of snappy dialog (some of it heavy on pofanity) crafted by Melissa Ross, a young Juilliard alum whose play Nice Girl got warm reviews earlier this year (click here to read an interview with her).

Under the surehand of MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow, Of Good Stock is expertly performed by a top-notch cast that includes Alicia Silverstone, making her first New York stage appearance in three years as the attention-needy Amy, and the stage stalwart Kelly AuCoin, who is particularly good as the menschy Fred.

But what’s missing from Of Good Stock are insights of any kind. There are hints of something more substantial about the different ways that women reared by a misogynistic father might struggle to create meaningful relationships with men but that script is at least two drafts away from this one.

That may not be entirely Ross' fault. Of Good Stock was pushed into production earlier this year when the play originally planned for this slot was withdrawn because its author Richard Greenberg felt it needed more work. 

A young playwright doesn't have that kind of clout and it's unfair to expect her to turn down an opportunity like this one but Ross' play could have used the extra gestation time too.

"Shows for Days" is Just a Passing Fancy

Shows for Days is Douglas Carter Beane’s paean to the power of theater to change lives. But theater is most powerful when a playwright transforms his personal experience into a story that tells each person seeing it something about themselves and Beane’s shaggy-dog coming-of-age tale, now playing at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through Aug. 23, falls far short of that.

It tells the story of the scrappy community theater in Reading, Penn. that gave the teenage Beane his start in show business back in the ‘70s. It's presented as a memory play, complete with a stage version of the playwright who narrates the action and even offers a where-are-they-now account of the characters at the play’s end.

Because Beane is Beane, Shows for Days is filled with laugh-out-loud one-liners like "If theater was easy, the goyim would do it”. But the storytelling is a mess, undermined by underdeveloped characters and overcomplicated plot lines.

Beane may have meant to extend his meta concept by making his characters the kind of stock figures that lots of people think of when they think of community theater: the self-dramatizing actress, the sexually ambiguous leading man, the wisecracking stage manager, the flamboyant black drama queen and the temperamental diva who runs the troupe (click here to read a run down of some other community theater stereotypes).

But because Beane doesn’t root his characters in any semblance of reality (it’s never clear what any of them do for a living, why they’re drawn to the theater or if they’re any good at it) it’s hard to care about them.

Meanwhile, he heaps on plot upon plot: there’s the battle to find a home for the theater when its old one is marked for demolition, its rivalry with another theater company in the town, a bunch of ill-fated romances, a secret illness, a debate over the n-word and Car’s debut as a playwright.

Both Beane and director Jerry Zaks seem to know it’s too much and so their solution is just to rush by it all. The result is like one of those rambling anecdotes that someone you’ve just met tells you: it’s far more entertaining to the teller recalling it than for the listener who has no idea what the hell any of it means.

What partially saves the show are the performances, lead by Michael Urie’s as the Beane stand-in, here called Car. Urie, who smoothly switches back and forth between the older narrator Car and his 15-year-old remembered self, is such an endearing stage presence that he might have kept Moose Murders running if he’d been around then (click here to read an interview with him).

But, of course the evening belongs to Patti LuPone who plays Irene, the force of nature who runs the theater. Perhaps because the role seems so tailor-made for LuPone’s own larger-than-life personae, she relaxes into it and downplays the Patti mannerisms, while still flashing hints of the passion Irene feels for the theater.

In fact, as has now been widely publicized, LuPone was so self-possessed at the performance I saw that, without any histrionics, she was able to lean over and snatch the cellphone of an audience member who had been texting during the second act (click here to read an interview with her about that).

Theater lovers love shows about theater and so this is the kind of show that, after detailing all the things wrong with it, critics tell you to see anyway. My husband K likes to say they can do that cause they don’t have to pay for their tickets. So, all I'll say is if you’re a big Patti, Urie or Beane fan, you should see Shows for Days. Otherwise, you might want to wait for some other show.

Why “Happy Days” is Happy Theatergoing

Having never seen Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, I approached the production that’s now playing at The Flea Theater through July 18 in the same way that many people approach a bowl of Brussels sprouts: dubiously, but feeling as though it's something I should try because it would be good for me. 

But as all but the most die-hard carnivores have discovered, Brussels sprouts, when prepared well, can be delicious. And I came to a similar conclusion about this appealing version of Beckett’s meditation on human resilience in the face of existential adversity.

Happy Days famously opens with a woman stuck waist-high in a big mound of dirt. Unable to move, she still goes through a morning routine of saying a prayer, brushing her teeth and otherwise preparing for the coming day, even though no one ever visits and her only companion is her near-mute husband Willie who spends most of his time in a hole on the other side of the dirt pile.

Undaunted, the woman, her name is Winnie, fills her time with ceaseless chatter and grabs even the slightest reason to proclaim, “Oh, this is a happy day.” But that sunny outlook is put under even more pressure in the second act. The sight of the new challenge prompted an audible “Oh no,” from one man in my audience, who, apparently like me, had never seen the play before but had become totally wrapped up in it.

Beckett, the high priest of existential despair, is said to have written Happy Days in response to his wife’s request that he write a happy play. And in odd ways, it is optimistic. Endless playwrights have tried to imitate Beckett over the years but while they can set their characters in preposterous situations and give them witty things to say, very few have figured out how to imbue them with the humanity that animates even the most absurd of Beckett’s works.

His Winnie is a stand-in for all of us who soldier on, knowing that, ultimately, we will lose in the game of life but find solace in our rituals, our dreams and the connection, no matter how tenuous, to one another. Maybe it’s because I have a big birthday on the horizon but Winnie’s indomitability in the face of her approaching mortality moved me greatly.

Talking for almost two straight-hours, without being able to move or even, at times, to gesture, Winnie is a monster of a role and although Brooke Adams has spent far more time doing movies and TV than theater, she proves she’s up to the task (click here to read an interview with the actress).

Adams is still achingly lovely but now 66, she gives a vanity-free performance—flaunting her flabby arms and not-so-pert breasts—that cuts to the heart of the play, and of those of us watching it. 

Her Winnie can be as perky as a '50s-era sitcom mom but she’s not unaware of her situation and there are times when she almost succumbs to the encroaching despair. But then she summons up her courage and carries on a little while longer.

Willie is played by Adams’ real-life husband Tony Shaloub. It’s a small role and most of its dialog is conveyed in grunts and physical bits of business. But Shaloub, an inveterate scene stealer who can’t help himself even when the person he’s robbing is his own spouse, is terrific.

And Andrei Belgrader’s direction is as light on its feet here as it was flatfooted in CSC’s recent production of Doctor Faustus (click here for my review of that one). Everything—the set, the lighting—is rendered slightly artificial, underscoring the metaphorical while simultaneously anchoring the play in the real.

The ending of Happy Day is purposefully ambiguous but Adams and Shaloub give it a hint of hopefulness that might disappoint ardent Beckettists but that would probably please the determinedly sanguine Winnie as much as it did me.

Theater Books for Summer Reading 2015

Some people claim Memorial Day as the beginning of summer. Other say the season starts when the school year ends and people begin to skip out from work early on Fridays. Sticklers insist that summer arrives with the summer solstice. But just about everyone agrees that the Fourth of July means it’s time to slow down, kick back and relax a bit. For me, that means the time to do two of my favorite things: (1) sitting out on our terrace, reading, snoozing and sipping cocktails as the sun goes down and (2) putting together the latest of my annual summer reading list of books about the theater. This year’s selections are all biographies, oral histories and other non-fiction about the theatrical world that should keep you good company from now until Labor Day. So happy reading and, of course, Happy Fourth of July:

100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl. The author of at least a dozen plays, including The Clean House and Stage Kiss, and the mother of three, Ruhl has somehow found time to craft this marvelous collection of mini essays (some running only a couple of sentences) that examine what it means to be a playwright and a parent in the 21st century. Her musings range from the way mothers, from the child-slaying Medea to the suicidal mom in Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother, are portrayed onstage to a loving tribute to her mentor Paula Vogel. The writing and thinking in this book are as fresh and insightful as they are in her plays and I highlighted so many lines that my copy now looks as though some yellow-blooded creature hemorrhaged all over it.

Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart:  After I posted last year’s list, a reader left a comment suggesting that I read this memoir about the early career of the legendary playwright and director Moss Hart. As it turns out, not only had I already read it but this is one of my favorite books of any kind and I don't know why I haven't put it on one of these lists before now. His biographers point out that Hart, who wrote such classics as The Man Who Came to Dinner and Lady in the Dark and directed such iconic shows as My Fair Lady and Camelot, romanticized his rise from office boy to toast of the town but this often hilarious tale, which centers around his first collaboration with the veteran showmaker George S. Kaufman, is filled with famous names, funny stories and a love for the theater that is totally enchanting and far more entertaining than last year's stage adaptation.

Black Broadway: African Americans on the Great White Way by Stewart F. Lane. Broadway is often called The Great White Way but black performers have been there, acting, singing, dancing and creating shows right from the start, as Lane, himself a six-time Tony-winning producer, chronicles in this terrific pictorial history. He brings the story right up to Cicely Tyson’s Tony-winning performance in the 2013 revival of The Trip to Bountiful but the best chapters are the early ones that focus on the challenges faced by 19th century all-black companies like the one lead by Ira Aldridge, the first African-American to play Othello on a professional stage;  the indignities of the minstrel shows that required performers to wear blackface and the rise of the much-imitated jazz-inflected musicals of the 1920s. It’s all a great read and great preparation for the eagerly anticipated new musical Shuffle Along, or, The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Follows, which will be directed by George C. Wolfe, choreographed by Savion Glover and starring Audra McDonald

Elia Kazan A Life: If Moss Hart’s book is the best ever written about a life in the theater (and it is) then Kazan’s memoir is a close runner-up. A member of the influential Group Theatre in the ‘30s and the dominant Broadway director from the ‘40s through the ‘60s who helmed the original productions of Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire, Kazan, who died in 2003 at the age of 94, was present at the creation of our modern dramatic theater. He was also a great writer and his memoir provides a no-holds-barred look at the rivalries among such Group heavyweights as Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets and Stella Adler; Kazan’s symbiotic relationships with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, his fateful decision to name names before Eugene McCarthy’s red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee and his discovery and/or nurturing of such then-young talents as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Warren Beatty.

Stage Blood: Five Tempestuous Years in the Early Life of the National Theatre by Michael Blakemore. They say that revenge is a dish best served cold but, as the subtitle suggests, you can still feel the heat of Blakemore’s fury as he describes his years as a director for London’s National Theatre under his mercurial mentor Laurence Olivier, who founded the company in 1963, and his detested nemesis Peter Hall, who ran it from 1973 to 1988. Blakemore still clearly smarts from what he considers to be his unfair treatment at the National and his whining about one perceived insult after another can get tiresome. Luckily, he also lards the book with lots of rich details about how shows get put together at one of the world’s greatest theaters and that’s catnip for any theater junkie.

Theatreland: A Journey Through the Heart of London's Theatreby Paul Ibell. This grab-bag of history, gossip and other tidbits tracks the London theater world from the days of Shakespeare’s original Globe theater right through to what was going on in the West End in 2009, when the book was published. Ibell has amusing stories to tell about everything from theatrical dynasties like the Redgraves to theatrical hangouts like the Hotel Savoy. And although his references to the shows on the boards in 2009 may date the book, the backstage stories are timeless, and it all adds up to a fun read, particularly if you’re planning a trip to London any time soon.

The Untold Stories of Broadway: Tales From the World's Most Famous Theaters by Jennifer Ashley Tepper. She now runs 54 Below, the cabaret spot that has become a clubhouse for Broadway performers, but Tepper’s true vocation is theater enthusiast of the highest order. Over the past few years, she’s made it her business to interview almost everyone who has had anything to do with the New York theater world and turned what they told her into a two-volume oral history of Broadway from its golden years after World War II, right up to the present. Adding to the fun is the fact that instead of telling the story in chronological order, she’s organized her tale around Broadway's iconic theaters, with people from producers like the legendary Hal Prince to the stagehands and doormen, who truly have seen it all, sharing bite-size anecdotes about those places where the magic happens.

A Last Look at Three June Shows: "Guards at the Taj," "The Qualms" and "The "Tempest"

June is the Indian summer of the New York theater season. Falling between the heat of the shows rushing out to qualify for the Tonys and other awards and the relative freeze that settles over the theater world during the summer months, it often plays host to smaller shows with milder ambitions, some of which in past years have turned out turned out to be my favorites of the year, others just pleasant ways to past the time. There was a bumper crop of such shows this year and I’ve already talked about some of them in recent posts but three significant ones that I haven't gotten to are closing within the next week and so, once again, I’m going to try to catch up by doing one of my highlights and lowlights summaries:

GUARDS AT THE TAJ: I’ve run hot and cold on the playwright Rajiv Joseph even though his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2010. But you should look for his meta-historical piece about two lowly guards keeping watch on the Taj Mahal to be on my 10 Best list at the end of the year. The play starts off as yet another riff on Vladimir and Estragon of Becket’s Waiting for Godot as the titular guards—boyhood friends with differing personalities, one a stickler for rules, the other an inveterate flouter of them—stand sentry on the eve of the unveiling of the Taj Mahal but it turns into a morality tale on art, friendship and the cost of blind obedience to authority.

Highlight: Joseph wrote his piece for the actors Omar Metwally and Arian Moayed, and their amazing performances, under Amy Morton’s brilliant direction, more than justify the faith he put in them. They—and this production—are alternately hysterically funny and profoundly heartrending

Lowlight: Some critics have carped at one thing (the colloquial language Joseph gives his characters) or another (the graphic violence in which he involves them) but not me. I thought every single thing worked just as it should and by the end, I was totally gobsmacked.

THE QUALMS. Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris’ riff on Lorraine Hansberry’s classic A Raisin in the Sun, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and so I, like everyone else who cares about theater, was eager to see what he would do next and even more intrigued when it was announced that the subject of race would be replaced by a focus on sexuality. Here’s the setup: a young couple makes its first visit to the regular meeting of a group of swingers, who get together to have guilt-free sex with one another but the newcomers may not be as open as they think they are.

Highlight: The show has a kick-ass cast, lead by Jeremy Shamos as the uneasy newbie husband and anchored by Donna Lynne Champlin, who plays a plus-sized swinger with a big heart and who seems incapable of giving a dishonest performance.

Lowlight:  But despite those performances and Pam MacKinnon’s straightforward direction, I didn’t believe a bit of the will-they-won’t-they debate that Norris creates (in any semblance of real life, the group would just kick out the troublemaker: I sure wanted to). And I was particularly pissed off by having yet one more white playwright create an effeminate black male character (switching the races of the group’s alpha male and its swishy one could even have been an interesting way to  heighten the drama).

THE TEMPEST. It’s always a treat to sit in the middle of Central Park on a balmy summer evening watching a free performance of Shakespeare in the Park, even when it’s a so-so production like this one of one of the Bard's most complex plays, which completes its five-week run this weekend.

Highlight: Director Michael Greif has created a sensual production that is  beautiful to look at and Michael Friedman’s original music played by percussionist Arthur Solari is lovely to hear. And it’s also nice to see that despite all his TV success, Jesse Tyler Ferguson continues to remain loyal to the company that gave him his start by coming back again and again to play one of his trademark clowns.

Lowlight: The problem is with the rest of the casting, particularly the lead. Sam Waterston is a Shakespeare in the Park stalwart who has performed in 13 productions over the past four decades and is often a fine actor with Emmy, Oscar and Tony nominations to his name. But he puts an idiosyncratic spin on this play’s main character Prospero that makes him seem less like the exiled duke and mighty sorcerer that Shakespeare created than an addled old guy who just wandered into the park.

Why "Significant Other" is a Significant Play

The gay best friend has become a stock character in contemporary plays. From The Heidi Chronicles to If/Then, he’s the sidekick there with a shoulder to cry on, a snappy wisecrack to add comic relief but no inner life of his own. Now, the gifted young playwright Joshua Harmon moves that character from the sidelines into the spotlight with his moving new play Significant Other.

Its protagonist is Jordan Berman, a twentysomething gay guy who has three female besties: the lovable narcissist Kiki, the wry cynic Vanessa and the quartet’s salt-of-the-earth anchor Laura, with whom Jordan is so close that they tell one another they will marry if no one else will have them. If this were Oz, Kiki would be the Lion; Vanessa, the Tinman; Laura, the loyal and most beloved Scarecrow but Jordan would have the central role of Dorothy.

The foursome have been BFFs since college, seeing one another through Vanessa’s on-again-off-again affair with a much older married man, Laura’s half-hearted romances and the timorous Jordan’s crush on a hottie who’s just started working at his office. When the play opens, they’re all at Kiki’s bachelorette party, trying to calm her bridezilla behavior and wondering what her marriage will mean for them as a group.

As everyone who has been through the rite of passage into adulthood will know, it will mean that the intimacy of even the tightest bonds between them will loosen, particularly as the others also find partners with whom to share their lives. And that, in turn, will mean feelings of loneliness and abandonment for the person who doesn’t find that special someone.

In this case that person is Jordan, whose only other significant relationship is with his aging grandmother. Jordan tries to be happy for his friends but because this is his play and not theirs, Harmon makes plain the painful cost of being the sidekick, the one who doesn’t get to be the bride, or in this case, even a bridesmaid.  

And yet, this is far from a dour evening in the theater. Harmon, the author of the rightly-praised Bad Jews (click here to read my review) knows how to balance humor and pathos (click here to read a Q&A with him). And he has great fun with the modern day rituals of mating and marrying, from I-like-you-do-you-like me email to the selection of just-for-us songs that couples choose for the first dance at their wedding.

Director Trip Cullman (click here to read an interview with him) has crafted an equally engaging production that moves in almost cinematic fashion, helped immensely by Mark Wendland’s smart, multi-tiered set, which I'll confess looked odd to me at first until my theatergoing buddy Bill pointed out how effortlessly it flowed, with the aid of Japhy Weideman’s astute lighting, from various wedding reception halls, to Jordan’s office, to the different apartments in which he, his grandmother and his friends live.

And the show is perfectly cast. Sas Goldberg as Kiki, Carra Patterson as Vanessa and, most especially, Lindsay Mendez as Laura are so spot-on that you know exactly the kind of woman each character is just by the way they’re sitting in their chairs when the light comes up on the first scene. 

An equal shoutout has to go to John Behlmann and Luke Smith, who play multiple roles and do it so effectively that it took me a while to realize that there weren’t more actors in the show. Meanwhile, the inestimable Barbara Barrie plays the grandmother without resorting to the clichés of being overly-cute or overly-wise as she tries to provide hope for Jordan.

But it’s particularly hard to think of anyone who would make a better Jordan than Gideon Glick, who has made a specialty of these kinds of gawky but endearing characters in shows such as Speech and Debate and Spring Awakening (click here to read a profile of him). 

When Glick's Jordan said “no one has ever told me they loved me,” there was an audible chorus of empathetic sighs from the audience at the performance Bill and I attended. But Significant Other also allows Glick to show other colors—cruelty, selfishness—that help to make his character a fully-fleshed out man. 

Now, there are moments when Glick’s technique abandons him and emotions overtake him so much that it’s difficult to catch all the words pouring out of Jordan. But even so, his performance—and this play—is a testament to the fact that even the most hackneyed character can be made significant.