The Understudy

GRADE: B-

By Theresa Rebeck. Directed by Scott Ellis. At The Laura Pels Theater. (CLOSED)

You might have heard that Julie White is in this play. If you haven't reading any one of these reviews will remind you or that in big starry Technicolor: JULIE WHITE IS IN THIS SHOW! might as well be the blurb on the poster. The now-beloved comedic actress, who won a Tony for playing a high powered agent in The Little Dog Laughed, plays a stage manager at a put-in rehearsal for an understudy who also just happens to be the man who left her at the--oh, who cares, Julie White is in the show. Theresa Rebeck gets high marks from some, and everyone praises the Kafka parody that makes up a chunk of the show. Justin Kirk and Mark Paul Gosselar also are widely praised for their performances. Some detractors (and even some boosters) fault the play for being thin, for not making a lot of sense, and for plowing well-tilled soil. And even a couple of critics--notably Linda Winer and Elisabeth Vincentelli--don't particularly like Julie White's performance. Did I mention she was in this show?

TalkinBroadway A
(Matthew Murray) The Understudy is so sly a satire of Kafka’s writing, and so smart a comic exploration of how the famed German author’s output could apply to the existentialist musings of theatre folk just standing by life, that its playwright, Theresa Rebeck, may herself need to adopt a heretofore unfamiliar appellation: insightful comedienne.

Lighting and Sound America A
(David Barbour) By the time all three characters get together for an utterly pointless gesture of joy in the face of an uncaring world, Rebeck has long since won over the audience with her own brand of screwball hilarity. The Understudy is such an accomplished piece of fun that -- who knows? -- it might even make old Franz K crack a smile or two

Wall Street Journal A-
(Terry Teachout) I suspect that America's regional theaters are going to be seeing a lot of The Understudy next season. Not only is it pulverizingly funny, but the fact that it's a three-hander means that it can be done on the cheap. That's OK by me, though I wish that Ms. Rebeck had had the courage of her convictions: If she'd chosen to eschew sentiment and stay funny from curtain to curtain, The Understudy might have been comparable in quality to Michael Frayn's "Noises Off," the best of all possible backstage farces. But The Understudy works on its own switch-hitting terms, enough so that I wonder whether the Roundabout Theatre Company might want to move it to a larger house. Now that "Brighton Beach Memoirs" has crashed and burned, we could use a good, solid comedy on Broadway, and "The Understudy" fills the bill with laughs to spare.

The New Yorker A-
(Unsigned) Though the play is undermined by a few flaws, Rebeck’s script and the three excellent actors are terrific when the play hits its stride, delivering a clever indictment of contemporary theatre while making the characters’ personal circumstances ever more Kafkaesque: they are no more in control of the forces of celebrity, art, money, and Broadway than they are of their own fates.

NY Magazine A-
(Dan Kois) White’s loopy voice rises in panic and falls into sorrow, just as her hands nervously fly up to tie her hair into a ponytail, pull it free, and tie it up again. She’s the best of a thoroughly excellent trio, rounded out by Justin Kirk as the talented Harry, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Jake, the Hollywood action star for whom a bitter Harry is the understudy. All three expertly patch over the holes in Rebeck’s occasionally thin script, while handling the show’s well-written, soulful conclusion with grace. And director Scott Ellis makes great hay of the ridiculous, yet oh-so-believable, idea of Kafka on Broadway, complete with vertiginous sets, overwrought music cues, and onstage precipitation.

Backstage A-
(David Sheward) Still, The Understudy has plenty of pointed observations on the frustrations of trying to be an artist in a crassly commercial world. Directed by Scott Ellis with straightforward speed and economy, it's a fast, funny 90 minutes. Julie White, probably the sharpest comedian working on stage today, makes Roxanne a delightfully conflicted figure: supremely competent at putting a show together but a mess when it comes to her personal life. Watch her twisted dance of anger as she hides her head in her sweater when she realizes she must work with her former lover. And the way she brandishes her cell phone like a weapon when she threatens Harry with calling the producers to fire him if he doesn't straighten up and fly right is an acting lesson in itself.

TheaterMania B+
(Sandy MacDonald) The authenticity that the actors achieve also helps to brings out Rebeck's brilliant layering of themes. Much as she might make fun of Kafka -- she gives Roxanne a great scene skewering his view of women -- she gets him deeply. After all, what could be more Kafkaesque that an unsuccessful actor trying against all odds to be heard and seen -- or a supposedly successful one adrift in a wasteland of pop culture? Still, the charming closing scene leaves us with a glimmer of hope for this odd-lot trio and their quest for some kind of meaningful recognition.

NY1 B+
(David Cote) While Rebeck’s material is breezy and never too dark, taking easy potshots at Hollywood and Broadway, there’s admirable skill and intelligence in its execution, and sympathy for her struggling characters. Scott Ellis’s production is impeccably cast and paced, with White wringing big laughs out of the simplest inflection and a raised eyebrow. Kirk, a regular on the TV show "Weeds," specializes in smartass charm and understated punch lines. And Gosselaar keeps pace with the least flashy but most affecting part. All in all, The Understudy is a bittersweet portrait of people forgetting who they are in the mad rush to become something else.

Entertainment Weekly B
Pity that there's not more chemistry between White and Kirk, whose characters have a long and complicated romantic history; alas, there's even less between White and Gosselaar. (In the play's summer 2008 premiere at Massachusetts' Williamstown Theatre Festival — where EW named it one of the best shows of 2008 — Kristen Johnston was a better match with costars Bradley Cooper and Reg Rogers.) But when it comes to slapping guys or threatening to hit them with shovels, White simply can't be topped.

Variety B-
(David Roony) Funny but slight, clever but without any real depth, the one-act gains considerable fizz from Scott Ellis' punchy production and from the bristling interplay of its three fine actors, each of them exposing different shades of a profession that ricochets between glory and rejection.

AP B-
(Michael Kuchwara) The play is slight and not as funny as it should be. Please, no more Jeremy Piven-mercury poisoning jokes, for one thing. Yet director Scott Ellis has marshaled his ingratiating cast — Julie White, Justin Kirk and Mark-Paul Gosselaar — well. And they are a game group, giving spirited performances in this brisk 90 minutes of often noisy confrontation.

Hollywood Reporter C+
(Frank Scheck) There's much that the playwright gets right with her comic premise, including the imagined sections of Kafka's "play," which are a perfect imitation of the writer's style, and her depiction of the professional rivalries endemic to the acting profession. But there's just as much that falls flat or is repeated to the point of tedium: A running gag about an apparently stoned (unseen) tech manager quickly loses comic steam, the romantic complications of the three characters have a generic feel, and the fact that every conversation onstage can be heard via a loudspeaker system covering every square inch of the theater strains credibility. It also seems highly unlikely that Jake, one of the show's leads, also would be the understudy for his co-star.

OnOffBroadway C+
(Matt Windman) Scott Ellis' animated 90-minute production makes up for the underwhelming text by providing solid laughs, energized performances, and a strange scenic design that twists and turns to reveal ridiculously elaborate, Kafkaesque settings. The play even ends with a soft-shoe dance sequence.

Newsday C-
(Linda Winer) The 90-minute comedy loses steam when it abandons its sharp show-biz satire for soap-opera relationship stuff, but Rebeck's idea of a star-driven Kafka hit on Broadway is ridiculous enough to feel like truth.

NYDaily News C-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Despite some funny lines, a supercool cast and awesome sets by Alexander Dodge, the play-within-a-play built around a run-through of a long-lost Kafka epic comes off as an overblown sketch with a worthy message: Everyone's a zero-status standby at some point. Or, in Kafka-esque terms, everybody's a bug, squashed by circumstance, luck, even love.

NYTimes D+
(Charles Isherwood) the play is more blunt than barbed on this subject. The inevitable Jeremy Piven mercury-poisoning allusion earns a big, easy laugh, but Ms. Rebeck hasn’t bothered actually to write a joke about the kerfuffle. And the play’s mechanics aren’t particularly fine-tuned, as one or another character wanders offstage to go to the bathroom or take phone calls, conveniently allowing Roxanne and Harry to hash out their history, or Harry and Jake to spar over line readings. The Understudy is an unstable mixture of satire, sentimental comedy and a smidgen of farce. (An unseen crew member, befogged by smoking pot, keeps pushing the wrong buttons and scooting the wrong sets onstage.) Perhaps not surprisingly, the director, Scott Ellis, cannot seem to blend the styles very smoothly.

ShowShowDown D
(Patrick Lee) Although slight and weakly dependent on contrivances (you'll nearly use up fingers counting how many times the characters forget that their "private" conversations are being heard over the loudspeaker) this backstage comedy has the potential to be more diverting and fun than this production allows. The premise is tasty - we're at a put-in rehearsal where a legit actor has been hired to understudy a movie star - and there are fun if predictable barbs at how today's celeb-crazed culture has trickled down to the theatre biz. But the production is a non-starter with the actors steered toward choices that slow the show to a crawl.

NYpost D-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) The proceedings keep hitting contrived snags, the biggest being Harry and Roxanne's joint baggage -- he dumped her right before their wedding. The real issue, though, is that Roxanne seems to be written for a younger actress. White has no chemistry with either man. Amid forced entrances and exits -- staged in a needlessly frantic manner by director Scott Ellis -- everybody complains, grandstands, agitates, throws fits. The theater, Rebeck seems to say, is one crazy place. And she says it over and over again.

Village Voice D-
(Michael Feingold) Rebeck, far from creating her own world, dresses her nonsense up so that it seems to take place in this one, while slipping in such absurdities that you wonder what planet she's living on. Maybe on Mars, Broadway has understudy rehearsals like the one in The Understudy ...White works awfully hard to garner the play's meager laughs; she sounds, at times, understandably, like a woman trying to lift a 10-ton truck. Kirk's irritating mannerisms fit his irritating character handily; Gosselaar, stuck with the "feed" role, fills it amiably with charm and good looks.

TB A 13; LSA A 13; NYM A- 12; TNY A- 12; WSJ A- 12; BS A- 12; TM B+ 11; NY1 B+ 11; EW B 10; V B- 9; AP B- 9; HR C+ 8 OOB C+ 8; ND C- 6; NYDN C- 6; NYT D+ 5; SSD D 4; NYP D- 3; VV D- 3; TOTAL: 166 /19=8.73 (B-)

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Streamers

GRADE: B


By David Rabe. Dir. Scott Ellis. Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre. Through Jan. 11, 2009.

Reviews for this revival of Rabe's Vietnam-era play are the definition of mixed. With its focus on recruits waiting to ship off to war, and fighting among themselves over issues of race, class, and sexual orientation, is the play dated or relevant? You won't find a consensus on that. OK, how about Scott Ellis' production and the performances of the cast? Depending on who you read, they're either crackling or dull. AM New York's Matt Windman may embody the play's most salutary effect: He's not sure how much he liked it, but he's still thinking about it.

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) The setting may be America of four decades ago but there is something eerily topical about the Roundabout Theatre Company's tough-minded, thoroughly engrossing revival of David Rabe's Streamers. Questions about race, violence, sexuality and fighting an unpopular war in a distant country are still with us, just as they were for four young soldiers in an Army barracks somewhere in Virginia in 1965...Rabe is a superb craftsman. He knows how to tell a story and build tension, a sense of suspense that director Scott Ellis carefully exploits in this production. Yet the playwright is also a lover of language, unafraid to give his characters lengthy speeches that veer into the poetic.

Theatermania A
(Sandy MacDonald) Thanks to a crack director, Scott Ellis, and a sizzling cast, the Roundabout Theatre's first-rate rendition...makes you wonder why this play took so long to claim a major marquee...Rabe trains his cool, reportorial eye not on any ideological arguments, but on the systemic marginalization that produces willing killers...There's a searing transparency to his writing, intensified by the honest, grounded performances Ellis has elicited from this elite cadre of actors.

Variety A
(David Rooney) The ongoing relevance of this final play in Rabe's Vietnam trilogy is matched by its striking theatricality. The punchy dialogue is simultaneously literary and naturalistic, shifting repeatedly between dynamic exchanges and beguiling monologues...Aided by a terrific ensemble that exhibits all the frictions and bonds of a unit in close quarters, Ellis brings a firm, even hand to the piece, keeping a judicious lid on performances that could have tipped over into melodrama.


Newsday A-
(Linda Winer) Remains a powerful, if a bit predictable, link between racism and homophobia at home and the carnage on faraway battlefields...Rabe puts an improbably tidy cross-section of classes and impulses into the same cadre room, then manages to thread his one-from-column-A, one-from-column-B characters into a subtle weave of brutality and vulnerability. Scott Ellis' production is taut and threatening, yet full of tenderness for his characters.

New Yorker B+
(John Lahr) Within the hubbub of his story line, Rabe captures the particularly toxic chemistry of boredom and dread....Rabe is expert at building the awful pressure of impending woe. The competent cast of this production hits the notes but not always the music of his writing. Nonetheless, his vision is vivid and devastating.

Backstage B+
(David A. Rosenberg) Now, at a distance from Vietnam, Streamers encompasses all wars and pockets of hate, within and without. The communal house that these men struggle to establish is infected by wildernesses of spirit that reflect what happened in the Garden of Eden...In some ways time and circumstances have not been kind to all aspects of Streamers, yet Rabe's talent is not as a historian but as a playwright who knows that at any moment people can be "all of a sudden dead."

Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) Yes, the play creaks in examining the emotional burden of the wisecracking, self-loathing homosexual, but it compensates by being otherwise sufficiently steeped in recognizable realities...Ellis never approaches the somewhat predictable as a foregone conclusion. He builds the rage and the resentment gradually, letting cool disdain and indifference simmer until all they can do is boil over.


The Daily News B+
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Who needs a battlefield when a barrack gets so fraught with anxiety and frustration that it becomes its own war zone? That notion looms large during the sturdy revival of David Rabe's drama Streamers, which is invigorated by a top-flight, if little-known, cast.

The New York Times B
(Charles Isherwood) The theater’s heavy reliance on revivals sometimes feels like a steady diet of disillusionment. Plays that seemed risky and fresh a couple of decades ago can seem tame, lame or seriously stale when they’re dusted off and remounted today. Not so with Streamers...Despite the clarity of the new Roundabout Theater Company production that opened on Tuesday night at the Laura Pels Theater, crisply directed by Scott Ellis, this simmering stew of class and race, sex and violence still seems mighty strange.

Show Showdown B
(Patrick Lee) David Rabe's excellent 1976 play...seems to have been revived for, and directed with a focus on, its gays-in-the-military content. On that score, the production is engaging as a time-capsule that invites contemplation about what has and has not changed. Unfortunately the play's other themes are shortchanged, which drains the production of dramatic tension...Still, it's great to hear Rabe's dialogue again, and two of the performances - by Hale Appelman and J.D. Williams - are exactly right.

AM New York B-
(Matt Windman) Almost a half a week after watching it, we’re still debating the merits and flaws of David Rabe’s 1976 military drama Streamers...Quite frankly, we can’t seem to decide whether or not the drama is dated. While the shock value of the violence is gone and the uneven dramaturgy is frustrating, much of Rabe’s raw dialogue still possesses a compelling spark. And though the Vietnam tale has relevance to our country’s status in Iraq, it offers nothing that we haven’t seen before. In any case, director Scott Ellis has staged a sharp production with an excellent all-male cast.

The Journal News C+
(Jacques Le Sourd) Streamers, a 1976 play by David Rabe, caused quite a stir when it opened. As a revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company, it makes you wonder what all the fuss was about...All this does not invalidate Rabe's occasionally brilliant talent as a dramatist, which surprisingly shines now in an extended coda for a drunken sergeant named Cokes, played with commanding humor by Larry Clarke.

CurtainUp C+
(Elyse Sommer) This earnest, well-acted but mostly patience-trying revival is under the disciplined direction of Scott Ellis. The play certainly makes its points, although they have been blunted by time, and tamed by our increasingly inured perspectives...This 32 year-old play doesn't come close to displaying the kind of graphically detailed brutality and violence that we have recently become accustomed to in the theater. It is not so much an anti-war play as it is a play that examines the psycho-sexual motivations that may be a part of what instigates wars.

New York Post C+
(Frank Scheck) This drama about a group of soldiers nervously biding their time in a Virginia barracks while waiting to be shipped off to combat reveals itself to be both talky and schematic, lurching predictably toward melodrama...The play comes alive only fitfully, primarily in the scenes involving two drunken sergeants (John Sharian, Larry Clarke)...Scott Ellis' production is well-acted and competently staged, but it lacks the dramatic tension necessary to compensate for the play's more predictable aspects.

Time Out NY C
(Helen Shaw) Rabe’s play isn’t just another war-is-hell yellathon. His barracks drama—rife with homosocial tension among gay Richie (Hale Appleman), possibly closeted Billy (Brad Fleischer) and fed-up Roger (J.D. Williams)—has delicacy, craft and humor. Too bad, then, that director Scott Ellis and most of his cast often seem intent on draining those qualities from the show.

Philadelphia Inquirer D+
(Toby Zinman) Unfortunately, it's hard to judge Streamers' current power because the cast is weak - unconvincing and flat. The stage should crackle with unanswered questions, unfathomed motives, uneased consciences. But it doesn't, and Scott Ellis' direction seems flaccid and dull.

Associated Press A 13; Theatermania A 13; Variety A 13; Newsday A- 12; New Yorker B+ 11; Backstage B+ 11; Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; The Daily News B+ 11; The New York Times B 10; Show Showdown B 10; AM New York B- 9; The Journal News C+ 8; CurtainUp C+ 8; New York Post C+ 8; Time Out NY C 7; Philadelphia Inquirer D+ 4; TOTAL: 159/16=9.94 (B)

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