‘Complicity’ Review: A Muddled #MeToo Drama

It has been about five years since the rise of the #MeToo movement. Debate remains on the cultural shifts it has wrought and whether these shifts will last.

More laws are on the books now, more men have been jailed or fined. Others have been swiftly canceled. And then uncanceled almost as quickly. But what of the people who enabled these men?

This is the subject of “Complicity,” a new play by Diane Davis at the New Ohio Theater in Greenwich Village, which addresses the topic head-on, but very clumsily, as in mismatched heels. The drama concerns, though never shows, Harry Wickstone, a legendary producer, and the hold he maintains over the women and men unlucky enough to orbit him. Two of them are Tig (Katie Broad), a naïve ingénue, and Lilia (Christian Paxton), her more seasoned co-star. Five terrible minutes in a luxury hotel room send these two women on radically different paths before the play forces them back together and then tragically apart.

This brief description renders “Complicity” as a more coherent work than it truly is. Its story arcs need smoothing, its characters clarifying, even in their basic details. Tig has a sister, Sima (Nadia Sepsenwol), equally inexperienced, who somehow acts as her agent. What official role does Nigel (Zach Wegner), Harry’s fixer, play at the studio and what does he want of Lilia? (Tonia E. Anderson plays a television host: Christian Prins Coen and Ben Faigus appear in several small roles.) Davis struggles to illustrate how Hollywood works, how people work. But it’s less of a struggle than a slap fight, without clear winners.

Under Illana Stein’s direction, little gels. Some scenes, like a talk show sequence, are played for realism. Some, like the women’s various breakdowns, are played with an embarrassing expressionist bent. Rarely do these scenes convince. Overacting is rampant, presumably with Stein’s encouragement. Even when the actors aren’t speaking, they cycle through various expressions. At times the actors seem to be in entirely different productions — one playing a scene sincerely, one archly.

It is an unhappy irony that in a play about collusion they could not collude on a house style. The design is more coherent, but only in the slapdash sense that the producers seem to have skimped on budget and time. Scenes are underlit, projections of time and place appear and disappear before they can be read. The cheap costumes are a puzzle with few satisfying solutions, the sets wincingly flimsy.

Here is one more irony. Five years on, amid the noisy and bad-faith hand-wringing of whether the movement has gone too far or not far enough, the producer Harvey Weinstein’s case stands firm. So many women came forward and their stories were presented with such lucidity and compassion by journalists — New York Times journalists among them — that his guilt was substantiated, despite his great power.

Women, finally, were believed. Punishment was meted out. As stories like these go, this stands as the surest, plainest, least ambiguous story imaginable. And even so, “Complicity” blunders so much in its telling.

Complicity
Through Oct. 15 at the New Ohio Theater, Manhattan; newohiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.