Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct’

We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you’ve heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.

But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman’s venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty’s labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson’s long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman’s manhandling of an actual lawn mower.

Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a “world class college.” He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac.” Currently he is separated from his third.

Soon another cliché enters: the “grossly underwritten” sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to “expose their mediocrity.” That’s Beatty’s Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.

“The erotics of pedagogy,” Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.

It is here you may say to yourself: I’ve seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays (“Oleanna”) and novels (“Disgrace”) — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man’s point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie’s lines are more like this: “I shouldn’t / I don’t know why I / Said that / Sorry I’m mm.”