Electroshock ’n Roll: Next to Normal Is Kitschy, Twitchy, Depressing
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At the Theater
This week I report on a new musical about suicidal depression, a new play about suicidal loneliness and the revival of a classic play that hinges on suicide. And how are you today?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the novel theme of Next to Normal, the soft-rock musical about the middle-class mom who’s a clinically depressed pill freak. Sitting across the aisle during the performance I attended at Second Stage Theatre was Stephen Sondheim, the founding father of the modern musical: urban desperation and neurosis (Company); the ravages of time and old age (Follies); Grand Guignol murder (Sweeny Todd); love and physical ugliness (Passion); lunatics and presidential slaughter (Assassins); or even newly opened diplomatic relations between isolationist America and the Japanese in 1852 (Pacific Overtures).
I don’t know whether Mr. Sondheim enjoyed Next to Normal. (He seemed to). But it’s clear at least that contemporary musicals can be about absolutely anything. (Think of Spring Awakening). The big number in Next to Normal, in which Mom hallucinates on the operating table during electroshock treatment, is a first. And in theory, it holds out revolutionary possibilities.
Had the show and its ECT scene gone unsafely beyond its surface promise, I’d be acclaiming the musical as the avant-garde equivalent to the Who’s innovatory, insane Quadrophenia (1973). Created by Tom Kitt (music) and Brian Yorkey (book and lyrics), and directed by Michael Greif of Rent, the new musical cries out to be liberated from its own clichés. Mark Wendland’s flashy three-tiered set is more cramped than it need be, as if straitjacketing the action. But the problem with Next to Normal is that it simply isn’t disturbing.
The electroshock scene amounts, at best, to a mild, kitschy echo of The Who’s Tommy of 40 years ago. Hallucinating Mom, surrounded by a battery of light bulbs, twitches tamely as her doc sings about “feeling electric” and strips down to reveal himself costumed, alas, as some kind of retro-rock star about to cruise a gay bar.
Rock on Dr. Fine!
MEANWHILE, NEXT TO Normal remains very uncertain of its tone or of what it wants to be. I’m loath to say this about its young writers, but, for all their gifts and ambition, Next to Normal is too frustratingly close to showbiz normal.
There’s sometimes perky, long-suffering Mom (the excellent but too sweet Alice Ripley); her compliant, saintly husband (Brian d’Arcy James, who manages to bring convincing emotional texture to someone “living on a latte and a prayer”); their crazy adolescent daughter, a neurotic musical prodigy (played by the 16-year-old Jennifer Damiano, who shines in the evening’s best number, “Superboy and the Invisible Girl”); and her doggedly devoted boyfriend who’s as big a dope as her dad.
There’s also a shrink who announces stuff like, “It’s been three weeks and we’ve got to break through to the roots of your depression!”
I ought not to reveal who the ghostly presence is who keeps tempting Mom to kill herself, though the twisted spookiness of his character is the one bizarre element that could rise to Sondheim’s inspired heights. But when a show ostensibly about a tragedy of chronic depression wants to send us home happily reassured with a rousing send-off titled “Let There Be Light,” its showbiz heart is depressingly in the wrong place.
LONELINESS IN THE city (that never sleeps) is the wan theme of Unconditional, Brett C. Leonard’s downer of a play at the Public Theater. Its shadowy opening image of a helpless white man, silenced by duct tape, who’s standing on a chair with a noose around his neck somehow manages to be peculiarly, flatly undramatic, as a black man nearby smokes a cigarette, mulling over murderous thoughts.
What should be horribly shocking is smoothly and knowingly contrived, an arty tableau. Like many other of Mr. Leonard’s short, overlapping scenes of desperation and urban violence laced with racial tension, the atmospheric high points are less the outcome of the playwright’s self-consciously gritty writing than the resonating effect of the terrific blues soundtrack.
Directed by Mark Wing-Davey for the LAByrinth Theater Company, Unconditional is a film onstage in the interwoven storytelling tradition of Paul Haggis’ Crash, with a touch of Quentin Tarantino’s simmering ultraviolence. Mr. Wing-Davey’s set designer (Mark Wendland again) has divided the Public’s Shiva Theatre into two audience sections at opposite ends to each other, and a few spectators watch the action from above as if in a small arena. The stage itself is divided by mobile partitions into three playing areas with the intention of creating “filmlike” sequences and different perspectives in close-up, medium long shot and long shot—depending on the view from your seat.
What’s the point of creating a film onstage? Theater has been using fluid film technique for years. But Unconditional’s moving partitions are somewhat cumbersome, and busy stagehands hurriedly changing the sets between quick scenes can’t, inevitably, re-create an effortless dissolve.
And none of this can disguise the dispiriting quality of Mr. Leonard’s short stories about nine needy souls living alone and disconnected in New York City like a lonely hearts club. The racially charged thread that binds some of them together doesn’t ring true. (Sign daubed on a black man’s front door after he violently protested his racist dismissal from a West Side office job and sought legal advice: “Silent nigger lies, loud nigger dies.”)
The late-night bar scenes are pro forma: “Her mother hates me,” the lonely guy announces to the stranger about his broken marriage. “Maybe she hates me, maybe she doesn’t.” A black woman is reluctantly unfaithful to her suffering husband and goes to bed with an unhappily married white guy:
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says.
“Neither do I.”
“Hold me, O.K.? Hold me tighter. Tell me I’m beautiful. …”
A song with a mournful lyric will be heard later: “Suddenly the night has grown colder. …” We’ve witnessed a brutal murder or two, a druggie freakout, a furious domestic blowup, a hanging, a missed blind date, a seduction, a furious fuck, a divorce, a hasty marriage.
There are a thousand stories in the naked city. But the real inspiration behind the production isn’t movies—good or mediocre. To the contrary, the desolate production has been inspired by the urban loneliness of ersatz Edward Hopper images. LAByrynth actors are renowned for their reality and uninhibited naturalism. But within all the posed, painterly silhouettes, what could be less natural onstage than miserable still life?
IF ONLY THE depressive suicides in the revival of Beth Henley’s 1981 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Crimes of the Heart, were funnier and wackier! Now that we’ve seen the dark, soapy excesses of August: Osage County, Ms. Henley’s meandering Southern gothic whimsy might be considered quite conventional and even passé. Only one of the play’s three famously weird sisters sparkles in the Roundabout Theatre’s so-so production at the Laura Pels: Sarah Paulson is wonderful as the lovelorn, failed singer Meg.
Kathleen Turner, making her New York debut as a director, takes it all too seriously. After all, this is a farcical tragedy of broken hearts in which little sis Babe explains that she shot her lawyer-husband in the kishkas because she didn’t like his looks, and Mom hanged herself after hanging the cat. (It’s possible Mom did it because she hanged the cat.)
Anyway, we’ll never know. I know I could have used the laughs.
Copyright © 2008 The New York Observer. All rights reserved.
