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Posted: |
Feb 16, 2017 - 8:26 PM
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By: |
Howard L
(Member)
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from today's (print) NY Times--
Review: ‘Man From Nebraska’ Delivers a Midlife Crisis of Faith
By BEN BRANTLEY
Though its words are well chosen and artfully placed, Tracy Letts’s “Man From Nebraska,” which opened on Wednesday night at Second Stage Theater, has a radiant respect for what cannot be said. As directed with masterly force and delicacy by David Cromer, with a matching performance by Reed Birney in the title role, this beautiful drama of lost faith occurs amid a darkness that swallows language.
It’s a scary place, for sure, and it’s one many of us have visited, often around 3 a.m. during a sleepless night — even a man like Ken Carpenter (Mr. Birney), long steeped in the religious convictions of the Baptist church and a life shaped by reassuring routine. But Ken has reached that dangerous age (the script puts it at 59) when solidity suddenly looks like sham.
So one night — after a churchgoing Sunday that has been, you imagine, like hundreds of other Sundays in Ken’s life — he finds himself sobbing violently into a hand towel in his bathroom. His frightened wife, Nancy (Annette O’Toole), asks him what’s wrong.
He chokes on the words: “I don’t believe in God.” And it becomes immediately clear that neither he nor Nancy has the resources to even discuss this declaration, much less provide answers.
“Man From Nebraska,” which was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in drama but is only now receiving its New York premiere, belongs to a genre that would seem to have been wrung dry by 20th-century fiction writers, usually male, ranging from Sinclair Lewis to Saul Bellow. I mean the midlife crisis story, in which a man suddenly finds himself shriven of the beliefs that have hitherto defined him.
It’s a premise you might expect to be treated with dynamite by Mr. Letts, best known for his explosive studies in American fear and loathing, including the plays “Killer Joe,” “Bug” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “August: Osage County.” But “Man From Nebraska” is an uncommonly gentle and compassionate work, which anatomizes characters and situations so classic that they are often dismissed as clichés.
Like most thoughtful artists, Mr. Letts understands that clichés shed their staleness when examined closely enough. “Man From Nebraska” doesn’t upend or subvert the archetypal plot of a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-American man on a journey of self-discovery.
Instead, it asks us to feel — truly feel — the pain and loss not only of its central character but also of everyone who surrounds him, and acknowledge the strength of those emotions. The effect is of staring hard at Grant Wood’s much-parodied painting “American Gothic” and finding startling truth in an image contaminated by overexposure.
Indeed, the first image of this production might be thought of as a latter-day variation on Wood’s 1930 portrait of a farmer with a pitchfork and his austere wife. In this case, husband and wife — Ken, an insurance salesman, and Nancy — are in a car, driving to church.
Their expressions are set in what might be called complacent resignation. Conversation is minimal. (She, looking out the window: “They’re finally going to tear down that ugly house.” He, hands on steering wheel: “Mmm.”) Yet this quotidian moment, like every one that follows it, thrums with a silent apprehension.
That’s partly because of the staging by Mr. Cromer, who brought an understated, compelling inventiveness to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” in 2009 and, more recently, the exquisite musical “The Band’s Visit.” Takeshi Kata’s resonant, darkness-shrouded set suggests a tidily arranged cosmic warehouse from which furniture and lives can be assembled at short notice.
Each scene takes place in a space-defining pool of light that feels as provisional as it is lucid. (Keith Parham’s expert lighting is crucial to the production’s power, as are Daniel Kluger’s music and sound design.) The surrounding darkness is always present and impenetrable.
Within this visual context, the production’s opening moments eloquently and efficiently present the comforting limitations of Ken and Nancy’s life through brief vignettes. We see them in their pew at church; having lunch in a cafeteria; visiting Ken’s senile mother, Cammie (Kathleen Peirce), in a nursing home; and watching TV on the couch at home. (Television often forms the soundtrack here.)
And then: There is Ken, crying in the bathroom, clutching the faucet of a sink as if it were flotsam in a stormy ocean. After some fumbling consultation with his wife, his daughter (Annika Boras) and his pastor (William Ragsdale), Ken takes a plane to London, his first trip out of town on his own in 20 years.
He meets a swinging American businesswoman (Heidi Armbruster) en route, and once there is befriended by his hotel’s bartender (a marvelous Nana Mensah) and her artist boyfriend (Max Gordon Moore). For a couple of months, he pursues an existence unlike any he has known before.
At the same time, Nancy is slowly falling to pieces and derives some comfort from a friendship with the pastor’s ribald old dad (Tom Bloom). Ultimately, not much happens; somehow everything has happened.
Mr. Birney, a recent Tony winner for “The Humans,” inhabits and fills Ken’s tenuous world with a paradoxically commanding air of self-effacement. This is one of those quietly great performances (less frequent than you think) in which an actor seems more to be his character than simply portraying him.
Ms. O’Toole’s Nancy matches him in the bereavement of her character’s unexpected, unexplained dislocation from a secure marriage. (Ken and Nancy’s final scene together tears your heart in two.) None of the cast members ever, ever condescend to their characters, no matter how stereotypical they might sound in description.
They are all drawn from life, without caricature. So very much of what happens in this production’s ephemeral pools of light feels uncannily like life itself, unaccommodating and bewildering, utterly familiar and gloriously inexplicable.
From left, Reed Birney, Max Gordon Moore and Nana Mensah in the play “Man From Nebraska,” at Second Stage Theater. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
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Top man! Well-done.
Looking over his threads I see he has top taste in music too.
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What a great review!
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