Plenty of plays, from “Hamlet” to “Hamilton,” feature a restless title character itching for action. But “The Perplexed,” which opened on Tuesday at New York City Center Stage I, has six — and that’s not even counting the audience.
In any case, six are way too many for Richard Greenberg’s hermetic family comedy, a modest story inflated to unwarranted size by what appears to be dramaturgical panic. “The Perplexed,” directed by Lynne Meadow for Manhattan Theater Club, wants so much to be important that it forgets to be plausible first.
Or even followable; despite its generous running time and exhausting exposition, in which characters tell each other things they would already know, the play is mysterious to the point of perversity. You will hear dozens of disquisitions, in rich prose, on the moral gridlock of privileged people who can’t think of anything to do that won’t make the world worse. Yet you will barely grasp the basic architecture of their relationships.
Those relationships are as bewildering as Santo Loquasto’s floor plan for the vast library, complete with endless niches and nooks, of the Fifth Avenue apartment in which the play is set. The owner is a hateful magnate named Berland Stahl, on whom evil has acted as a preservative. Though ancient, he is said to have “missed his window” for dying.
Wouldn’t it have been fun, and dramatically useful, to meet him? But no, that would provide too clear an antagonist for a conflict that is built on internal muddle. Instead, assembled for a “Potemkin wedding” in the old man’s home, we meet — and meet and meet — the once-close but now long-warring families of the bride, Isabelle Stahl, who is Berland’s granddaughter, and the groom, Caleb Resnik. Friends in infancy, these idealistic yet cleareyed 20-somethings have been brought back together by fate, a force that Greenberg, in one of his overpolished quips, calls “coincidence with a publicist.”
The adults, though, are mostly a mess. It’s not just the feud, which has something to do with a slumlord lawsuit once brought against Berland by Caleb’s father, Ted Resnik, and by Isabelle’s mother, Evy Arlen-Stahl, who is married to Berland’s son, Joseph. The suit, which failed, got Evy and Joseph written out of the old man’s will but in the process made Evy’s career; she’s now a crusading New York City councilwoman. It also, somehow, for a time, ruined Ted’s life.
Or so I think; even after reading the play, which went through a lot of rewriting during previews, I cannot explain how being on the same side of the conflict provoked so much hostility from Ted’s wife, Natalie Hochberg-Resnik. (She is a familiar type in Greenberg’s plays: the passive-aggressive Jewish dilettante do-gooder.) Nor do we ever fully understand the nature of the trauma afflicting Joseph, who spends much of the play, when not in a stupor, drafting horribly inappropriate father-of-the-bride speeches. One is from the point-of-view of a fetus.
That the wedding will take place at midnight — after the cocktails, dinner and dancing — is a laughable device justified lamely and late in the play. Likewise the crisis, such as it is, is resolved with a ludicrous technological trick.
Fair enough; this is a comedy, after all. Plot contrivance is the name of the game.
But character contrivance is deadly; too much makes a play’s engine start kicking and stalling. Isabelle’s brother, Micah, a medical student with a sideline in gay fetish porn, has no function except to heighten the hysteria. (He has recently been outed as a star of PrepBoyz.com.) Patricia Persaud, Berland’s Guyanese-born health attendant, has more of a role in the proceedings, but mostly exists to provide person-of-color contrast to the white characters by enjoying her work and smiling incessantly.
If Greenberg were directly exploring socioeconomic privilege, would that be palatable? In any case, he’s not; he’s exploring instead the privilege of narcissism. The self-regarding adults, caught in the gap between the certainties of an older generation’s brutality and a younger one’s impatience for change, are free to spend their lives dithering and whining and finding excuses for themselves.
So if they are perplexed, it is not in the theological manner suggested by the 12th-century tract from which Greenberg takes his title. In “The Guide to the Perplexed,” Maimonides sought to explain the nature of God; these characters barely believe in their own existence, let alone a deity’s. Even the rabbi, a family friend named Cyrus Bloom, is “self-defrocked,” another victim of moral restlessness.
It’s not hard to spot Greenberg’s own perplexity here; three of his characters have writer’s block. James, Evy’s brother, is a novelist who has given up writing altogether. “It seems I’ve completed my trajectory,” he says. “From promising to successful to very successful to less successful to still less successful to a dismal sales track to being my sales track to goodbye.”
It’s probably no coincidence that this character, though functionless in the plot, is the one who can’t stop talking about its themes. He asks how people no longer at the center of the culture can still do meaningful work. Evy, a public servant, at least gets stoplights installed at dangerous intersections. What can a formerly edgy, then mainstream, then beached writer do?
If this is Greenberg’s plaint as well — the scent of despair does waft off the stage — I hope he has now worked through it. His career has been full of ups and downs; Manhattan Theater Club has produced 10 of his more than 30 plays, some bombs, some (like “The Assembled Parties,” in 2013) stunners. His best work doesn’t wallow, it strides, making no apologies for a style that is lofty, literary and unafraid of long trips around the barn to get to the point.
“The Perplexed” feels needlessly ashamed of all that. It participates in James’s loathing for himself and his class — “The people I know congratulate themselves if they cope with a sad feeling” — yet ultimately lets them off the hook. The production is left to distract by ingratiation, with its comedy rhythms and clarinetty music. Even so, the cast, headed by the piquant Margaret Colin as Evy, can’t find a tone that works, though the always-ferocious Frank Wood, as Joseph, gets his teeth into some pathos and doesn’t let go.
“The Perplexed” as a whole lacks the muscle for that. It might have worked better if it hadn’t tried so hard to be a major denunciation (and yet a loving excuse for) an entitled generation. The ambition is admirable, but a play can’t follow every road open to it. Sometimes installing a stoplight at a single intersection is the best thing anyone can do.
The Perplexed
Tickets Through March 29 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; 212-581-1212, manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
