Arts :: Theater
Men are from Mars, dames are just crazy by Brian Jewell
contributing writerWednesday Jan 16, 2008 Finally, someone has written a play about the problems of straight, white men! Oh sure, some might say that story has been written already and it’s called the Western canon, but those people are feminist harpies. Wendy Wasserstein is clearly not of that bitchy brood; her final play, Third, is an awkward comic/dramatic exploration of the "culture wars" that lampoons that beloved straw man, the nutty ivory tower academic.
Set at a fictional New England liberal arts college in 2002, Third opens with Professor Laurie Jameson addressing a Shakespeare class. "This is a hegemony-free zone," she smarmily declares, informing the students that they should feel free to challenge all points of view, especially those cloaked in racism, sexism and so forth. As she launches into a strained analysis of King Lear as a narrative of gender role indoctrination, one starts to suspect that there is one point of view not to be challenged: Her own. Indeed, a student who stops to chat with Jameson after class - one Woodson Bull III, nicknamed Third - gets only condescension when he suggests that King Lear is the hero of Lear, and an imperious dismissal when he asks for an alternate screening of an out-of-print movie version of Lear; he’ll be at a wrestling meet when Jameson shows the film to the class.
After this brief conversation, Third is rather fascinated by the prickly professor, but she is thoroughly fed up with the bright-eyed Midwestern jock. She’s already decided that he’s an over-privileged golden boy with questionable morals and politics, and no inner life. Over the course of the semester they gently spar, culminating in a battle over Third’s term paper on Lear. Jameson claims that Third’s psychosexual analysis of the play is simply too good, and accuses him of plagiarism. Third challenges Jameson to prove her claim, and accurately charges that she is busting his balls because as a straight white man "who happens to like America" he represents everything she hates about the inequities of the world.
Third successfully defends himself at the resulting inquiry, but considerable damage has been done to his academic career and his faith in the open-mindedness of intellectuals. Damage has also been done to the friendship of Jameson and her colleague, Professor Gordon, who recognizes Jameson’s folly. In addition to this academic drama, Jameson has plenty of worries on the domestic front. Her husband is distant, her father has Alzheimer’s, and her younger daughter is dating a much older man. Did I mention that Jameson is also menopausal? Oh these silly, hormonal dames!
Jameson eventually mends fences with Gordon, has a moment of honesty with her daughter, and even reaches out to the wronged Third, dropping by his dorm room to offer an apology. He shrugs it off without losing his quiet amiability. This limp and unconvincing resolution is perhaps meant to argue that there can be some kind of accord between red and blue states. But if Wasserstein bought into the simplistic idea that there is a sharp and clear dividing line between liberals and conservatives - and from the stark divide she creates between Third and his crunchy college, I suspect she did - then she’s at best making a naïve argument, and at worst simply perpetuating the us versus them mentality.
Wasserstein has also stacked the deck against her main character. Despite the softening touches of Jameson’s anguish over her troubled personal relationships, she seems more like a figure from a political cartoon or comedy sketch than a real person. Wasserstein misses no chance, no matter how unrealistic, to point out how close-minded this liberal lady really is. When she learns Third’s first name is Woody, she assumes he was named after either Woody Guthrie or Woody Allen. Just a few minutes later she icily suggests he should transfer to a state school. Jameson’s obsessive monitoring of the nightly news is treated as laughable, even though her bitter crack that "You have to watch this administration like a hawk" is not just prescient, it’s an admonishment to those who weren’t paying attention when Bush started his war in Iraq.
Third, meanwhile, is unfailingly portrayed as polite, nice, thoughtful and open-minded; he’s bursting with the respect and intellectual curiosity that a college is supposed to foster. Even when he loses his temper he’s articulate and perceptive, berating his classmates for posing as free thinkers yet jumping all over him when he asks them innocent questions about their politics. We get to hear some of his impressive Lear scholarship, but not Jameson’s side of the academic inquiry; instead we get an aside in which she complains about hot flashes. It’s strange to see a female playwright go through such contortions in order to set up a situation where an intelligent, professional older woman needs to learn to shut up and listen to a young man. Is this a warning to liberals to come down to earth? A satire? An attack on feminists, or intellectuals?
In the Huntington Theatre production, Richard Seer’s direction doesn’t lend much light. He’s taken the farfetched story too seriously, emphasizing the dramatic elements rather than the comic, so that lines that could have raised big laughs only elicit smiles; and what might have worked as a scathing satire seems fuzzy and unfocused. Otherwise the production is competent, with the cast gamely trying to bring some depth to their characters. Graham Hamilton often makes the impossibly perfect Third seem believable, and Maureen Anderman brings prickly energy and a bit of frazzled charm to Jameson. It’s Robin Pearson Rose who makes the biggest impression as Professor Gordon, and no wonder; caught up in a personal tragedy of her own, she’s the only character who seems anchored in the real world.
For another trip to a world that slightly resembles our own, you can catch Adrift in Macao, a new musical spoof by Christopher Durang, with music by Peter Melnick. Set in a nightclub in an exotic port city in the 1950s, the muddled musical is sort of a spoof of film noir, as filtered through The Carol Burnett Show. (Alas, Carol is playing second fiddle to Vicki Lawrence and Lyle Waggoner.) The show is full of the absurdism expected from Durang, but surprisingly low on wit.
The playwright clearly didn’t care about the plot so I won’t bother to summarize it. Suffice to say that a bunch of 10th-generation photocopies, just barely recognizable as film archetypes, stumble around delivering bad jokes and inexplicably bursting into mediocre songs. Perhaps the melding of the bleakness of film noir with the optimism of MGM musicals is meant to be funny. It isn’t.
The talented cast is unexpectedly adrift; they don’t seem to know how to make this work any more than Durang did. Only the invaluable Kathy St. George nails it, camping and vamping with wide-eyed glee as a faded songbird. Newcomer Austin Ku isn’t as apt, but manages to land laughs through comic brute force as a mysterious "Asian stereotype"; and Ariel Heller has the right idea in his portrayal of a tough but wounded palooka, but he needs to turn up the volume. Director Stephen Terrell has come up with some clever staging and more clever choreography, but there’s only so much he can do. Some turkeys just don’t fly.
Third plays at B.U. Theatre, 264 Huntington St., Boston, through Feb. 3. Tickets $15-$75. For reservations and info visit www.huntingtontheatre.edu or call 617.266.0800. Adrift in Macao plays at Lyric Stage, 140 Clarendon St., Boston, through Feb. 2. Tickets $54-$295 (for a special performance on Jan. 18 that includes a reception with the playwright). For reservations and info visit www.lyricstage.org or call 617.585.5678.
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