It's too late for Now or Later

Grant MacDermott looks for a way out.  Of this script.

Just last month, with David Lindsay-Abaire's Good People, the Huntington showed us how to do a political play. 

And now, with Christopher Shinn's Now or Later, they've shown us how not to do one.

Actually, I suppose Shinn himself did that - or at least he demonstrated how not to write a political play.

Or did he simply confuse "play" with "polemic"?  For Now or Later is a very cleverly devised polemic (and one I often agreed with). It's just never convincing as, you know, human drama, basically because no one but a debate club president (or maybe Andrew Sullivan) would ever behave like Shinn's hero, and no one but his shrink could ever buy his version of his own motives.

And without any believable emotional resonance, Now or Later boils down to a duel between educated narcissists, over equally-justifiable neoliberal stances. All the point-counter-point I admit is mildly diverting at times; and all the "no-that's-not-what-I-really-said" dialogue is sold well by most of the cast (and very well by one actress in particular).  Still, we keep waiting for the real show to start - thus even though it's short, Now or Later is also (like Shakespeare's Pyramus and Thisbe) tediously brief.

Here's the set-up: photos of the president-elect's gay son have surfaced in which, while dressed as the prophet Mohammed no less, he fellated a dildo at a "naked party" on campus (naked parties are, for those out of the loop, a pseudo-transgressive Ivy League tradition - even the "hot" Bush twin was caught at one). Now, believe it or not, Shinn's entire play turns on whether or not "John, Jr." (son of "John, Sr.") should issue a statement of apology for depicting the spiritual leader of a large portion of the planet as a - well, you know - that word they call guys who fellate other guys.  (I'm not interested in a fatwah either, thanks all the same Chris!)


Yes, that's really the play.  I admit the subject is "brave" in a strangely pointless way, in that it constructs elaborate thought experiments around actions no sane person would ever contemplate - which means, I'm afraid, that as a depiction of what counts as "conflict" for a normal human being, it's really just a deep pile of p.c. doo-doo.  And then there's the unfortunate fact that current events have overtaken Shinn's hypothetical script and demonstrated with such violence the folly of his hero's position.  So of course John Jr. will apologize.  Of course he won't instigate assaults on our embassies and possibly the murder of an ambassador (or even a terrorist attack back home), over some dumb ironic gay shock joke at a naked party at Yale.

Seriously.

Yet it seems to take a very long time to get to that "of course" - Shinn milks a whole play out of this slim premise! But there's only one way to make such a ride dramatically interesting: there has to be some sort of buried, intense grievance causing Junior to hold out so long on Senior.  In essence the dramatic (as opposed to political) premise of the play has to be: why does Sonny hate Daddy so much?

But after about eighty minutes of tease, the big father-son show-down fizzles, because Dad doesn't want anything unreasonable; he doesn't want John Jr. to hop into the closet, for instance - he just wants him to honor his campaign, and keep Americans safe.  And it turns out the playwright doesn't have any other back-story tricks up his sleeve; indeed, he coughs up nothing like a wound or trauma sufficient to explain John's Jr.'s disloyalty and delay. Johnny is, apparently, not only relentlessly politically correct, but also really, really sensitive - read: narcissistic.  Just like his father, yes I know, but - big deal.

There would be, I think, one way to make this premise work like a charm - as black comedy; I got the impression the cast at the Huntington could have had a field day with that, but it would have required Shinn to admit he's really writing about privilege rather than politics.  As things stand, given the weakness of the material as earnest drama, it's a wonder that Michael Wilson's production ever holds us at all - which it does, intermittently, and especially when the talented Adriane Lenox is around, as a seen-it-all aide who not only cracks pretty wise but is also pretty wise.  There are other moments here and there, but the basic problem is that local cutie Grant MacDermott, who seems talented, can't quite make us sympathize with John Jr.'s elaborate circumlocutions (but then who could; MacDermott does, at least, get us to follow them, in itself no small feat).  Michael Goldsmith manages a bit better as John, Jr.'s self-effacing best bud - but then he gets punchier lines. I also admit I was impressed to varying degrees by the rest of the cast: Ryan King, Alexandra Neil, and Tom Nelis (a believable ringer for MacDermott as John, Sr.) are all talented actors.  Now let's bring them back in a real play.

Shinn City

Jennifer Blood and Chris Thorn in Dying City.

In Dying City (through this weekend at the Lyric Stage), playwright Christopher Shinn has big issues on his mind, but limits himself to small dramatic means. He seems to want to treat the Iraq War within the structure of a chamber drama - or something more like a cryptogram - and he's hit on a nifty little device to (almost) get him there: he conjures a pair of identical twins, one gay, one straight, one opposed to the war, the other fighting it, and, unsurprisingly, one alive and one dead. Shinn then allows their two identities - so alike and yet so different - to reflect and refract each other in a series of interactions with the soon-to-be-grieving-widow (and, perforce, the distant sister-in-law). The playwright's carefully-worded minimalism keeps you guessing as to the true nature of the actions and relations you're observing; but alas, as whatever "truths" he has to offer come clear, we feel not the frightening open vistas of, say, Pinter or Beckett, but instead a kind of reductive relativism. Whaddya know - deep inside, the two brothers are really just the same. In fact, they're like - wait for it - twins.

To be fair, if the destination proves unsurprising, the 90-minute journey there is often absorbing, although perhaps more as detective work than artistic experience. Shinn offers little in the way of dramatic frame as he wiggles between time frames, repeatedly sending one twin (Chris Thorn) offstage to return as the other, while wife/sister-in-law Kelly (Jennifer Blood) throws on or drops a sweater. (But why not just do the time tunnel thang in the middle of a scene? Now that would be interesting!) But as the play progresses, we begin to see these gambits for what they are: a distraction from some rather shaky dramatic premises. Shinn seems to want to dodge any explicit politics, while drawing psychological parallels between America's pro- and anti-war factions. His solution to this quandary is to source the brothers' neuroses in the bogeyman of a sadistic Vietnam-vet dad, which only made me grit my teeth at his reliance on cliche. We finally unlock the puzzle box, only to find Rambo inside? Say it ain't so!

But alas, it is. And it doesn't help, really, that Shinn's characters are either tongue-tied or almost too articulate for their own good (even if this does describe quite a few twenty- and thirty-somethings I know). It's not that this trio almost channels the New Yorker when analyzing their own tastes - it's that their lines drop so many lit-bombs (pardon the pun), as when Kelly explains her attraction to autopsy shows like CSI by musing that they signify "the mystery of a death can be solved and therefore symbolically reversed." Uh-huh. Thud. This kind of dialogue is roughly the aural equivalent of the thematic shoe Shinn drops via the set design - about two-thirds of the way through the play, the back wall of Kelly's apartment becomes eerily translucent, revealing - yes, wreckage. As in Iraqi wreckage - or maybe 9/11 wreckage - or, of course - emotional wreckage. Quick, cue "Everybody Hurts." (In New York, the stage actually revolved, just so we could "get" that Shinn was giving us every side of the argument.)

Only somehow I think the folks dodging the bombs in Baghdad might take offense at the implied equivalence of their plight with that of two upscale New Yorkers in an empty loft. (I kept hoping some little kid with no arms might pick his way out of that wreckage to watch "Law and Order" with Kelly, but no luck!) Rest assured, I admire the Lyric for taking on this play (in recent years they've bracketed their "Man of LaMancha" crowd-pleasers with the kind of risky work you'd think you'd see at the Huntington or ART); that's one reason I held this review for so long. (But once a show has closed, can't the "real" reviews begin?) Likewise, I can't fault any writer for tackling the Iraq War, so in a way I applaud Christopher Shinn. But something about his solution seems profoundly wrong - essentially, he's denaturing the conflict of its specifics and then re-configuring it as a kind of enigmatic soap opera.

Or at least that's what the Lyric production does. I'm usually a big fan of director Daniel Gidron, but here he plays things too safe by half; not nearly enough is at stake for Kelly (a rather anemic Jennifer Blood) until well into the play, and while Chris Thorn does quite a good job subtly differentiating both sides of Shinn's gay/straight coin, in the end he doesn't suggest much of the darkness behind either face. But then theatre folk may simply be jumping the gun with the Iraq War; generally it takes time for a culture to digest its own folly - and the Iraq War is a very big folly, far greater than Vietnam. It will take years for its repercussions to work their way through the culture - unless of course, President Bush gets his way, and the war goes on forever, and we never work our way through it.