|
A satisfying brew of angst and postmodern witBy Jessica Winter
At its best moments, Elegy for Lonely Guys feels simultaneously like an old friend and something wholly new, lest one forget that it is, in fact, humanly possible to stage a postmodern play that is simultaneously smart and sincere. Elegy even features a Ukrainian barfly, Victor, who constantly rails against excessive American reliance upon sarcasm. Victor is the play's most hilarious and broadest comic creation, but as played by sly, subtle Ehren Park, ES '00—who nails his accent so squarely that he makes John Malkovich in Rounders look like the scenery-ingesting hack that he is—Victor never slips into mere caricature. And a lazier playwright would let him, not only because the laughs come cheaper but because Victor is just a supporting player. The central matter of Elegy is an elusive, gossamer thread, and one is never sure where it begins or ends: no one knows who owns the bar except barkeep Susan (Leslie Klug, DC '00). Well, successful fiction writer Miles (Tom Woodrow, ES '99)—he of the unctuous dulcet tones, pseudo-professorial air, and masterful delivery of the word "shithead"—might know, since he's always strolling into the bar and pouring himself free drinks, which angers junior barkeep Carl (Nathaniel Garrett, ES '99) to no end. But then again, Carl's kind of a frat-boy type and has a shaved head, so naturally he's always pretty pissed off, maybe about sports or something. Plus, there might be something going on between Susan and Miles, or between Miles and Samantha (Maura Malloy, SY '99), best girl of aspiring writer Toby (Boomie Aglietti, DC '99), who craves Miles's approval. Rounding out the ensemble is Chuck (Ross Wachsman, ES '02), who has spent most of the last month passed out on various tables in the bar and has thus become an unlikely locus of sympathy and parental love (folks are always putting coasters under his cheek or blankets over his shoulders); and finally the boozy, "American Pie"—quoting philosopher Safran (Blake A. Edwards, SM '02), who comes off as the unfailingly endearing love child of Dean Martin and Michael Kin-sley. Edwards is the standout member of a strong cast. He never wastes a good line and wrings the most he can out of the occasionally weak one. Case in point: his throwaway line "Nice, isn't it?" is one of the funniest of the play. Safran, Victor, and Chuck act as the gabby (or snoring) chorus to ongoing intrigues concerning Miles's lechery and Toby's romantic and vocational angst. But not least because Elegy implicitly includes these secondary players in its title, the audience feels as though the play is as much about them as those characters who seem to have lives of their own. And indeed, a late-breaking revelation about Safran—tossed off casually, an approach that is one of the play's biggest merits—makes good on this assumption. Elegy does not come through in all respects. People always seem to be shouting at each other (especially Carl; someone get that boy a nice big keg), and they all talk alike. Surely one of them would assert his freedom of expression and choose not to intersperse his conversations with "fucking" so fuck-ing much. One expects an explication of these pitched tones and bad blood, but it never arrives. Script weaknesses also intrude upon Woodrow's performance, which is both rich and carefully considered—the voice he uses for Miles reverberates out of the deep, warm cockels of an ego currently applying for statehood. But the text of Elegy never quite proves its case that all the bargoers could be magnetically drawn to such a smarmy egomaniac, albeit quite a successful one. These, however, are small quibbles, because Elegy for Lonely Guys is a play blessed not only with a uniformly superb cast, but also with a playwright who is utterly lacking in the self-indulgence department. And there's a lesson to should be learned there, as we post-adolescent lonely guys and girls surely know. | ||||||||||||||||||||
