The Wall Street Journal-20080118-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Review - Theater- Funny Man Gets Serious
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Review / Theater: Funny Man Gets Serious
NEW JERUSALEM
Classic Stage Company, 136 E. 13th St. ($60-$65),
866-811-4111/212-352-3101,
closes Feb. 10
NOVEMBER
Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. ($46.50-$99.50),
212-239-6200/800-432-7250
ALFRED HITCHCOCK'S THE 39 STEPS
Roundabout Theatre Company, American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St. ($51.25-$96.25),
212-719-1300,
closes Mar. 23
New York -- David Ives, the highbrow clown who writes explosively funny one-act plays about eggheads like Philip Glass and Leon Trotsky, has now given us a deadly serious two-act play about a 17th-century philosopher -- and it's good. "New Jerusalem," in which Mr. Ives grapples with matters of life, death and the hereafter, is so disciplined and persuasive a piece of work that it makes me wonder whether the much-praised author of "Polish Joke" and "All in the Timing" might actually have his best days ahead of him.
The long subtitle of Mr. Ives's play, "The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza at Talmud Torah Congregation: Amsterdam, July 27, 1656," is fair warning to casual theatergoers that the laughter in "New Jerusalem," while not nonexistent, will be comparatively scarce. If you passed Philosophy 101, you'll recall that the author of "Tractatus Theologico-Politicus" was a pantheistic skeptic who at the far-from- ripe age of 23 was excommunicated by his co-religionists for promulgating the "abominable heresies" summed up three centuries later by Albert Einstein: "I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." Nothing, however, is known of the trial that brought about Spinoza's expulsion from Talmud Torah save for the formal writ proclaiming his guilt. In the near- complete absence of concrete information about the proceedings, Mr. Ives has cooked up a courtroom drama of his own devising in which the arrogant young philosopher (Jeremy Strong) and the chief rabbi of Amsterdam (Richard Easton) wrestle passionately with the ever- contemporary problem of faith.
While Spinoza's complex ideas receive a surprisingly clear airing in "New Jerusalem," Mr. Ives's real subject is the problematic place of revealed religion in a secular society. His fictionalized Spinoza, as we learn at the beginning of the play, has been spied upon by an agent of the Calvinist regents of Amsterdam, who fear the destabilizing consequences of the spread of atheism. "We are tolerant, but we have our limits," declares Abraham van Valkenburgh (David Garrison). "Like the God of Israel, we can smite. And with a vengeance." To this end he warns the chief rabbi that there is a heretic in his ranks and orders him to take prompt disciplinary action or face dire consequences.
Part of what spices up the resulting theological wrangle is that Mr. Ives's Spinoza is not a sober-sided thinker but a smug, immature young punk who revels in his own genius ("I do know a few things about God that nobody else does"). By choosing not to portray his hero heroically, Mr. Ives throws the viewer off balance and ups the dramatic ante several notches. He also takes care to leaven his script with pinches of black humor: "There is no Jewish dogma, only bickering." Some of the resulting laughs are a bit too broad, and Mr. Ives would have done better to omit the character of the philosopher's greedy, shrewish half-sister (Jenn Harris), but for the most part the comic relief serves to sharpen the pathos of the moment when Spinoza is rejected by his own community and sentenced to wander forever after in the chilly wilderness of modernity.
Walter Bobbie, best known for his staging of the Broadway revival of "Chicago," has brought to "New Jerusalem" a well-gauged physicality that intensifies the theatrical impact of the intellectual arguments of which the play is (mostly) made. All of the actors are excellent, but Mr. Easton, last seen around these parts in Tom Stoppard's "The Coast of Utopia," outdoes himself, giving a performance as vividly intelligent as it is vocally rich.
In recent years, alas, Mr. Ives has mainly been heard from as an adapter of other people's work -- he was responsible for turning Mark Twain's "Is He Dead?" from a dusty period piece into a stageworthy farce -- and "New Jerusalem" is his first new play since 2003. It was worth the wait.
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Unlike Mr. Ives, David Mamet is out to amuse in "November," his new play about a president (Nathan Lane) whose fathomless cynicism is matched only by his feckless incompetence. "Romance," Mr. Mamet's previous venture into knock-down-drag-out comedy, was funnier, but "November" contains plenty of triphammer punchlines. (Asked to name his price for a political favor, the chief executive replies, "I want a number so high even dogs can't hear it.") Though Mr. Lane is in the wrong show -- his acting is too fussy -- he gets his laughs anyway, mainly through sheer determination, and Dylan Baker and Laurie Metcalf are splendid as his smarmy chief of staff and agonizingly earnest speechwriter. Director Joe Mantello, who staged the superb 2005 Broadway revival of Mr. Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross," revs everyone up to a fever pitch of aggression, and Scott Pask's Oval Office set is a masterly miniaturization of the real thing.
All praise to Mr. Mamet, incidentally, for steering clear of too- easy jokes about the current real-life occupant of the Oval Office. The satire in "November" is strictly nonpartisan -- and blessedly so.
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If it's pure fluff you crave, the Roundabout Theatre Company delivers the goods with "Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps," a silly sendup of Hitchcock's witty 1935 film version of John Buchan's 1915 thriller. This piece of English toffee is performed by a hard-working cast of four, and much of the fun arises from the fact that two of the actors, Arnie Burton and Cliff Saunders, play most of the parts, changing hats and hurling themselves around the stage with mad abandon. The spoofery, which runs to inch-thick accents, who's-on- first dialogue and nudge-nudge references to other Hitchcock films, is decidedly collegiate, and I suspect "The 39 Steps" would have been more amusing in a small Off-Broadway house than in the 740-seat American Airlines Theatre, but the slapstick is worthy of a silent movie and is absolutely guaranteed to divert.
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Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, blogs about theater and the other arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at [email protected].
