Before “Sideways: The Experience,” Rex Pickett’s stage adaptation of his novel, begins, guests who have plunked down an extra $100, can participate in the experiential portion, a preshow cocktail party at the Theater at St. Clement’s. As waiters circulate with duck rillettes pot pie and tuna tartare tacos, two barmen pour wines meant to mimic those tasted by the play’s characters, old friends on a California spree. There is also merlot, though fans of Alexander Payne’s 2004 film version will remember a profane line arguing against that grape.
The cocktail party — less an immersive experience than a digestive one — is a nifty idea. Enough passed hors d’oeuvres will improve almost anyone’s mood. And booze goggles, I would imagine, would help to soften the show’s unrepentantly male gaze. But since my head goes swimmy after the first drink, I spent the hour and a half nursing, neglectfully, a small rosé, and approached the show sober, which I would not recommend. Creaky, queasily sexist and directed by Peccadillo Theater Company’s Dan Wackerman with oblivious joie de vivre, the play, I’m afraid, is corked.
Jack (Gil Brady), an actor turned director with a surfer dude drawl, and Miles (Brian Ray Norris), a pre-success novelist and unacknowledged alcoholic, have fled Los Angeles for Jack’s bachelor party — a week in the Santa Ynez Valley, low-key wine country. Miles envisions an orgy of rare vintages; Jack envisions an orgy. Inevitably, they meet Maya (Kimberly Doreen Burns), a waitress described in the script as “an earthy beauty” with her uniform shirt “provocatively unbuttoned,” and Terra (Jenny Strassburg), a tasting room manager, “like a wine geek’s most surreal fantasy.”
Before you can knock back a pinot noir, they have all decamped to what everyone insists on calling a “hot tub spa.” Will Maya open up her best burgundy? Will Jack make it to the church on time? How much more should I have swilled to make this white male wish fulfillment even baseline palatable?
Pickett has decanted his novel to the stage with an imperfect grasp of how stage plays work. He shoves observation into dialogue like a stepsister trying to stuff her feet into too-small shoes. How else to explain a scene in which Miles’s mother (Allison Briner-Dardenne) suddenly directly addresses the audience with her gripes about her son? “I just don’t understand why he won’t get his teaching credential,” she soliloquizes.
Still, formal infelicities are easily forgiven. Less defensible: a show which dilates on men’s sexual and romantic needs with female characters only present to enable them; a story of a misanthropic schlub who lands a smart, beautiful lady, just because. On the night I saw it, “Sideways” performed for a mostly female audience, but the surreal fantasies only went one way. Miles describes wines as “young, fresh, nubile,” “pornographically good,” “tighter than a nun’s—.” The rest, like his metaphor for a silky pinot, is unpublishable.
There are halfhearted attempts to endow Terra and Maya with interiority. (This is a problem of the script, not the actresses, who do what they can with the dregs afforded.) But when every woman is either a goddess or a problem, things start to feel ugly — then uglier still when the script asks Burns to remove her top (albeit with her back to the audience) and pour wine over her breasts. Suddenly, I wished I had drunk more — enough to black out, perhaps.
In the days following, I tried to suss out why the movie, which scored Payne an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, worked so much better than the play. It might owe to a different cast or the play’s pointed lack of golf carts. But I would guess it’s because Payne recognized that these blinkered characters are awful, and Pickett and Wackerman can’t or won’t. Or because some stories, unlike fine wines, don’t age well.
The merlot, a friend told me, was delicious.
Sideways: The Experience
Through May 24 at Theater at St. Clement’s, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, sidewaystheexperience.com. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
