The first question I ask whenever I see or even her about a
revival is “why are they doing this show?” The answer to that is right in its
name for Second Stage Theater. For although it may now be best known as the
incubator for such shows as Dear Evan Hansen and Next to Normal, the company longstanding
mission has been to give a second staging, a second chance, to works created by
contemporary American playwrights. So it makes sense that it would give such a
chance to Christopher Shinn’s Dying City, which hasn’t had a major production
here since it debuted at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre in 2007 and
became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Alas, the revival that
opened at Second Stage’s Tony Kiser space this week makes you wonder what the
Pulitzer nominators were thinking.
The play is a two-hander but it has three characters. It starts with a white guy named Peter buzzing
relentlessly to be let into the apartment of a woman named Kelly, who is
clearly reluctant to let him in. But it’s not what you think. It turns out that
Peter is a successful gay actor and the identical twin of Kelly’s husband Craig
who died in Iraq a year earlier. Brother-in-law and sister-in-law haven’t seen one
another since the funeral even though Peter has been trying to get in touch
with Kelly.
As Dying City moves back and forth between the night before
Craig left for his deployment and the encounter between the two people closest
to him, relationship are examined and secrets are revealed. Shinn clearly intended
the play to be a meditation on grief but he also wants to ruminate on the
differences between fraternal and spousal love, the definitions of what it
means to be a responsible man and, in a nod to a major issue of the day, what
constitutes a just war.
I suspect it’s the latter that appealed to those Pulitzer adjudicators.
But while its question is timeless, the treatment here makes Dying City seem
dated. And some of its dramaturgy is clunky too. Peter keeps getting and making
phone calls that have no effect except to get him on and offstage when the
playwright needs him to. And a deus ex machina concerning some emails makes no
sense at all
Still, one might forgive all of that if the relationships
between the characters seemed immediate and the performances made them seen
genuine. But neither is the case in this production.
The play calls for a single actor to play the brothers in
alternating scenes. With the aid of some telegraphing hair and costume changes—a
T shirt for Peter, a flannel shirt for Craig—Colin Woodell, whose screen
credits outnumber his stage credits in the Playbill, does a good job distinguishing
the brothers but he doesn’t dig deep into what motivates either sibling.
That’s even more of a problem for Mary Elizabeth Winstead, a
TV actress making her theater debut in a tough role that is almost all subtext.
For Kelly, a psychologist by profession, is intent on keeping her true emotions
to, and maybe even, from herself. So it’s right for the character to be opaque
but the actor playing her shouldn’t be.
Both actors might have fared better if the originally scheduled
director Lila Neugebauer had stayed with the production. But when Neugebauer, a
master at guiding actors through difficult plays, left, reportedly to begin
working on a movie, Shinn took over the directing duties himself (click here to read more about that).
Having a playwright direct his own work is rarely a recipe
for success. By nature, most writers have more of an affinity for the words
they’ve created than for the actions needed to bring those words to life
onstage. Shinn’s direction is plodding, making the show’s running time seem far
longer than its 90 minutes.
Even the design elements are flat-footed. The apartment Dane
Laffrey designed for Kelly is OK but I’m still trying to figure out what the black
void that took up so much of stage left was supposed to signify. Meanwhile lighting
designer Tyler Micoleau displayed no subtlety when it came to indicating the
constant time changes.
But I’m going to stop now because I get no satisfaction out
of beating up on a production, particularly one that’s already as wobbly-kneed
as this one is.
