We caught two more plays before I rushed my ass to JFK on Saturday.
On Friday night we saw All My Sons, an Arthur Miller play about – wait for it – an American family! With layers of distress and skeletons in the closet! Oh, surprise, surprise – Really, there were none. It’d be like looking for predictable linear storytelling in an M. Night Shyamalan film. (Although, since you always know the plots twist in his movies, I guess they all are predictable? What a mobius strip of story weaving!)
So anyway, it was a good play, starring a fantastic understudy for Diane Wiest, Patrick Wilson, Katie Holmes, and John Lithgow! I really wanted to ask him to do the Third Rock from the Sun salute, but he seemed so grandfatherly and tired at the meet-and-greet that all I could stammer out was, “Thank you.” To add to his “Aww, old Gramps” feeling, his foot was in a brace when he exited the theater. Sad!
I would have really liked to have seen Wiest, but her understudy really was fantastic. Even better than Lithgow, I’d say. Lithgow’s age or lack of stunt training really showed in his fight scenes, whereas Wiest’s understudy (I’ll have to look this up when I get ’round to unpacking.) pulled a lot of emotional investment from me at every second.
Patrick Wilson was ho-hum, and I’ve never paid attention to any of his other work, so whatever.
Katie Holmes sucked. Even Poofy Fairy, who got pictures with both Wilson and Holmes, complained about Holmes’ yelling. She must have been on the verge of losing her voice, because she seemed to screech everything out, and there was just the hint of scratchiness in everything she said. Her role was to play innocent and loveable and, true to Miller fashion, to then emerge as a more complicated creature. As the play wore on and she became more complicated, I started scrunching my nose at her more.
There’s one point where it’s Holmes versus Wiest’s character, and in a pinnacle of desperation Holmes yells out “I loved him!” It’s supposed to be very tense and that moment is supposed to be pierced by Holmes’ exclamation. Except Holmes did this very amateur actor thing where she just jerked her head to the sky and yelled out the line. It wasn’t believable at all. To me, she resembled a family dog imitating a coyote, howling aimlessly at the moon when it’s broad daylight. Didn’t really work. She just didn’t convince me of anything.
I’m just not big on Americana stories, so All My Sons, though sometimes riveting, was not my cup of tea.
On Saturday I packed, went to Speed-the-Plow, ran back to the hotel, got on the train, and threw myself at the JetBlue gate just as they announced boarding for my flight. It was quite the disappointment.
First of all, probably due to the impending doom that is looming over costly entertainment like Broadway, all publicity surrounding Speed-the-Plow was marketed as “Jeremy Piven in his role as Ari Gold – on Broadway!” Plays and musicals these days depend heavily on star power, and unless the theaters are ready to cut down severely on the lengths of their show runs, they’re going to have to really play up mainstream Hollywood casts to keep their doors open.
Piven’s role as Charlie Fox is similar to his role in Entourage only in that it’s a high-level position in Hollywood production. Though he and Raul Esparza definitely have their moments of banter in the play, it’s really not Piven as Gold. Knowing that we convinced Poofy’s friend to catch the play with us on the basis that it would be Piven as Gold, I feel misled by all of Plow’s advertising and media coverage.
Not sure if it was a joke or not, but supposedly Esparza was hungover for his performance that day. I didn’t notice any serious lack of performance on his part. Instead, I noticed all there was to hate in that play in Elisabeth Moss.
So Speed-the-Plow is this three-part play that should really have been left as two acts. It has three characters, two of which held up the entire performance. All of the cast members come from impressive entertainment backgrounds. The most recent find of the three is probably Moss, who stars in Mad Men. I’ve heard so many good things about Mad Men and I love mafia movies and can’t wait for this mafia-ish series starring someone who’s in the advertising side of media… I thought I’d love Moss.
But I didn’t! I hate her!
Because she sucks.
Posters lining the exterior of the Barrymore Theatre pull quotes about how great Moss’ naivete and innocence shine in Plow. These kinds of endorsements convince me that theater critics and reviewers are all in league with the future of Broadway (which they should be), in that they know they have to skew their angles to make people think every production running right now is the best thing ever. I don’t blame them for trying to instill faith in an industry that depends on people feeling good about themselves and whether or not they deserve their own treats. However, all those skewed reviews turn into material one would use to convince you to go on a blind date with her or his deadbeat cousin. “He’s not very talented, no, but he looks really good in custom-made suits! And when he shuts his mouth.”
Moss’ naivete and innocence are not “fresh” because she’s mastered the method of her acting.
Moss’ naivete and innocence are blatant because she can’t act live! I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she does a fabulous job on Mad Men. When it came to the second act featuring just Piven and Moss, the three of us were falling asleep. It was a good thing we were seated in the back row of the Orchestra, because I actually had to reach my arms to the sky and stretch in order to try to stay awake. Her enunciation was childlike, her pauses lacked purpose, and she just came off as very ditzy. The best parallel I can draw between Moss-on-stage and commonly known bad acting is pretty much any character from Buffy the Vampire television series. To be clear, she wasn’t on the melodramatic side of Buffy acting.
Met with the urgency of flying home, I didn’t even think twice about chancing the meet-and-greet. I liked Piven, I liked Esparza, but I didn’t like the final third of their three-person ensemble. It’s always unfortunate when you’re disappointed by something that you love that isn’t necessarily loved by the rest of the general public. Sigh.
And no, I don’t know what “speed the plow” means in relation to the play. (Feel free to tell me in the comments.)
