Glenda Frank
''Beyond Therapy''
''Beyond Therapy'' by Christopher Durang.
Directed by Garrett Zuercher for New York Deaf Theatre at the Actor's
Theatre Workshop,
145 W. 28 Street, 3 floor, NYC
May 2-20, 2007. Fri/Sat at 8; Sun. at 1 & 7 PM.
Tickets: $25. SmartTix (212) 868-4444
by Glenda Frank
''Beyond Therapy,'' Christopher Durang's satire on blind dating
and way-out psychotherapy, has a right to feel a little creaky in the joints.
It premiered in 1980 to resounding applause and two years later moved to Broadway
for a disappointing 21 performances. It's hard to know what went wrong.
Durang revivals have been surfacing here and there this season – ''The
Vietnamization of New Jersey,'' ''Adrift in Macao,'' ''Laughing
Wild'' – but few have emerged with their dark humor fully burnished
and ready to take on all comers. The production by the New York Deaf Theatre
is the exception -- an over-the-top delight, and some of that has to do with
the signing.
It takes only a little imagination to picture Bruce (Christopher Tester) and
Prudence (Hillary Baack) connecting online rather than through the personal
ads in a newspaper.
The opening scenario is familiar – a small restaurant, the slow waiter,
the uneasy pauses as two strangers struggle to make conversation. The uptight
Prudence in her black sheath and pearls has become formulaic, but Bruce is
a surprise. He is at once appealing, agitated and totally inappropriate –
as though he has lost all social inhibitions. He likes her breasts and blurts
it out. He wants to marry her, have children, and settle his male lover in
an apartment over their garage. He cries. And she has to deal with this. Nice,
nice.
Like any sensible urban single, Prudence takes just so much, tosses a glass
of water in Bruce's direction, is doused in turn, and departs. When
she answers his second personal ad – in which, with the approval of
his therapist, he alters facts – their meeting begins to seem more like
destiny than coincidence. He is still inappropriate, but the comedy deepens
into human longing and we are drawn in. The genius of this second meeting
is how they really connect. The bond reaches a comic apotheosis in the Betsy
Drake-Cary Grant duet that they sing. But then he barks at her and seems more
maniacal than moonstruck. By the time Bob, Bruce's lover, enters the
picture, it's a toss up between mayhem, madness, and the poignancy of
people fumbling (badly) toward a better life.
Which introduces the other half of the comedy, the eccentric therapists. Stuart,
Prudence's shrink, is possessive, manipulative, exploitative, and, as
played by Aaron Kubey, very sexy and funny. It's hard to believe he
is accredited – or even trained, but it's totally in keeping with
Prudence's character that she stays, even after their brief, unsatisfactory
(and unethical) affair.
The motherly Mrs.Wallace (Anne Tomasetti) with bright red hair, Bruce's counselor,
emerges as the highly flawed hero of the evening. Not only can't she remember
her patients, she can't recall the names of her three husbands and calls them
uniformly Mr. Wallace. She may confuse words (''porpoise'' for ''patient,''
) and talk to her stuffed Snoopy, but she believes in honest, intuitive reactions,
wherever they lead and she guides her patients toward discovering what will
make them happy. Maybe she goes too far when she applauds Bob for shooting
her (with a starter's pistol), but it's a comedy.
This back-and-forth action between the neurotic lovers, the individual lovers
and their therapists, and gay and straight characters keeps the play enough
off-kilter to make it lively, and director Garrett Zuercher has his gifted
cast play it in both large and delicate gestures so that the comedy never
swallows the human dilemma at the heart of the play. Even the deafness of
the players is serendipitous. A speaking couple (Zachary Linnert and Caroline
Burrows), who voice the dialogue for the hearing audience, sit at another
table in the restaurant – and later on the sidelines behind a screen
– as though they were mirror images of the signing couple. They become
a reminder that what we are seeing is magnified in multiple ways in the actual
world right outside the theatre. The limits of the stage are breached. And
as in the Deaf West Theatre production of ''Big River'' at the Roundabout
a few years ago, the mute actors seem more intense, the signing more an expression
of character and emotion than the conveyance of dialogue. New York Deaf Theatre's
''Beyond Therapy'' is the best Durang I've seen in a long while.
| museums | NYTW mail | recordings | coupons | publications | classified |