Prairie home companion

Ronan Noone's new play, Little Black Dress, arrives with a four-page, single-spaced preface/screed from the author detailing the play's long sojourn in "development hell," which in this case stretched over three and a half years. Over that time the playwright packed up his Dress and took it to Aspen, Austin, and Newton, and twice to New York. He modeled it once at Vassar, and then one final time here at his local launching pad, the Boston Playwrights' Theatre (where a fully-produced version plays through Oct. 24). Noone writes that at one point in the course of the seven readings and sixteen drafts, he'd "forgotten why I wrote the play, and was quite sick of this rollercoaster of cheap readings, short rehearsals, and frustrating dependence on feedback from an unknown audience." Yet by the finish, it seems (I'm guessing here) that he'd pulled the play "back into its original shape" and had at the same time "improved [its] mechanics, raised the stakes, refined lines, and discovered, finally, that the whole process was not a failure after all."

Okay. Then he rewrote it one more time.

And the really sad thing is . . . the play still needs work.

So I guess it's lucky that even now, the program includes a sheet of paper soliciting audience comments!

Reading this stuff, it's hard not to both sympathize with Noone (at right) and yet be somewhat skeptical of his self-deceived grievance. On the one hand, everyone knows what it's like to try to create something fresh and new while being assailed by contradictory advice and agendas. On the other hand, Noone repeatedly seeks out these assaults himself - we can only assume because nobody's agreed to produce the play as is; in essence, while railing against the commercial demands placed on his work by the development process, the author is on a mission to, yes, make it more commercial via the development process.

The irony is that if, indeed, Noone did reject most of the advice that came out of that process, then perhaps he did himself a disservice. Because Little Black Dress, like much of his work, starts strong, with coiled, blackly comic monologues, a bleakly amoral POV, and tightly structured scenes. But slowly it goes haywire, and we can feel, even if the playwright can't, precisely where and how it jumps the rails. In a word, Little Black Dress wants to be like its namesake: black, sleek, and making a short, spicy statement. But Noone begins embroidering all over it, adding flounces and dropping the hem; by the finale, the play is barely a little black dress at all; indeed, we're not sure what it is.

So if there were an intermission, my advice would be to leave during it, because for more than two thirds of its course, Little Black Dress is a nasty hoot, and it's being played to the hilt by a wicked-good cast at Boston Playwrights' Theatre.

But there's no intermission. So you have to take the good with the bad. And to be honest, there's still plenty of good. Noone's premise - two horny Kansas lads launch a gigolo service for the lovelorn ladies of the lone prairie - may feel a bit Risky Business-ish, but it has the same frank, amoral coldness that gave The Atheist its bite, and the playwright has a twist at hand (one of the boys is servicing the other's mom) that we feel could lift the proceedings to "the next level," as they say in the lower circles of development hell.

What's more, Noone has the benefit of a crackling cast and nearly-flawless direction. Marianna Bassham captures every lonely heartbeat of Amy, the long-suffering spouse and faithless wife who yearns to don that titular dress and escape to Florida - but who also knows that to "make your fantasy come true, you have to make some sacrifices," and has begun to wonder just how big a moral sacrifice she might be capable of making. Meanwhile Karl Baker Olson makes you forget all about his earlier, suffering-geek performances with his hungry-eyed young comer (literally), and Alex Pollock raises self-conscious dorkery to an art form as the reluctant business partner whose mother is also a client. Rounding out this dysfunctional heartland quartet is local stalwart Jeremiah Kissel, who brings his usual energy to a nasty turn as the average-joe husband who may, or may not, be the villain of the piece. Director Ari Edelson adds some flourishes here and there that hint at something like the amoral synchronicity of cyberspace, and there are a few, less-successful gestures toward pantomime (and maybe even dance). But in general this mostly-natuaralistic production is strong enough to serve as precisely what the author needs - an x-ray of his script that reveals what's broken in its structure.

Whether he'll be able to take advantage of the opportunity, of course, is another question; focus and build are hard things to pull off, but are in general required when murder, or even manslaughter, are in a playwright's sights. And focus and build are what Little Black Dress desperately needs; it's basically too skimpy a conceit to cover the doubly-ironic-dénouements and dance numbers Noone begins to load onto it. Indeed, towards the finish one gets the impression the playwright has the idea that writing characters who are morally off-hand means that he can afford to be off-hand too. Unfortunately, that's a fantasy worthy of his leading lady.

My Mother, The Car

When Nicky Martin told me last winter that the Huntington would be premiering Ronan Noone's Brendan this fall, my first reaction was, "Really? Why?" And now, after seeing the smartly-mounted production currently on view at the Wimberley, I'm still wondering the same thing.

You see, I'd already caught Brendan, in a very credible BU student production last season (under the direction of Justin Waldman, who helmed the current show) - when it impressed me as a likeable, in some ways well-crafted but in other ways ungainly, and decidedly minor, addition to the Noone canon. It still impresses me pretty much the same way: not much of an advance for Noone and not much of a challenge for the Huntington - or its audience. (The fact that the Huntington just wrapped another minor Noone drama, The Atheist, while down the plaza a far tinier company mounted the seven-hour Kentucky Cycle, only throws the theatre's lowered-expectations problem into high relief.)

Of course what Brendan has going for it is that it pleases the audience rather than challenges it. Who can't root for Brendan, the shy-but-lovable Irish boy with a wee drinkin' problem (and who hasn't tipped a few too many, Paddy?) and a wee bit of girl trouble too (and who hasn't paid for it, Seamus?), who only longs to be a Real American (and what refugee wouldn't want that, Mr. Cheney?). Well, I suppose I can root for him if I have to, but really, it would be easier if Noone actually followed through on the deeper questions his shy young slip of a play raises. The playwright maintains a smart, satiric tone in half his script - the half which follows Brendan as he romances the girl downstairs while learning to drive (his teacher is his only real friend, the "working girl" he lost his virginity to) in an effort to both hang onto his job and his bid for citizenship. At his finish, Noone goes all sappy on the Land of the (Formerly) Free, but till then his take on what it means to be an American (i.e., a girlfriend and a car) is bracingly clear-eyed. And if we can practically write the ensuing plot for ourselves (it's only a matter of time before the working-girl and the girl-next-door cross paths), its predictability is largely offset by dialogue so taut you could practically bounce a quarter off it.

Alas, it's in the "other half" of Brendan that Noone (at right) falters: his hero's mother has just died - with the withholding of said news operating as her final, strange revenge on him; not to worry, though - like some Gaelic castmember of thartysomething, Ma's ghost pops up on stage, and in her son's subconscious, to henpeck him into achieving his goals. So far, so cute, I suppose - only Noone clearly doesn't know what to do with Ma once he's conjured her, so local star Nancy E. Carroll is left pitching wry punch lines and little else (even though there's dark talk of a past suicide attempt). I suppose half a play is better than noone, so to speak - but isn't this kind of problem precisely what "development" is for? You'd think if the Huntington were going to stage a new script (and stage quite sharply, in a shiny simulacrum of the Hancock Tower by Alexander Dodge), they'd make sure it was finished first. Still, the lack of closure doesn't slow down the cast, with Dashiell Eaves and Kelly McAndrew leading the pack as the sensitive Brendan and his hearty, pay-for-play paramour. Noone, of course, must sense his good fortune to be blessed with not one, but two, Huntington productions in a single season - indeed, I too can only chalk it up to the luck of the Irish.

Read all about it

Campbell Scott makes his confessions in The Atheist.

Augustine Early, the antihero of Ronan Noone's The Atheist - now at the Calderwood Pavilion, featuring Campbell Scott - almost seems like the antithesis of his sainted namesake (despite a shared penchant for confessions) until, that is, you notice that tell-tale surname. "Early" is both an all-too-apt moniker for a journalist (the latter-day Augustine's trade; the earlier Augustine was patron saint of printers) and a sly ref to the saint's hard-partying youth, prior to the penning of his famous Confessions. With one eye on Rosseau, and another on the tabloids, Noone seems in The Atheist to be attempting a cynical update of the Catholic classic - one that this time ends not in salvation but in self-destruction.

And the playwright at least halfway succeeds - or at least I think he does; it was hard to tell from Campbell Scott's faltering performance on opening night. A year or two ago, I saw Scott essay the script in a reading which poured forth with well-chilled intensity, and since then, the play has had a successful run in New York, with an encouraging Times review. So it seemed that Scott's return engagement would be a sure thing - until memory slips in the second act reduced him to reading directly from the text for long stretches, which sabotaged his smooth, subdued strategy.

For unlike his counterpart in New York (Chris Pine), Scott dispenses with impersonating the characters in Augustine's saga, and concentrates instead on his carapace of smug contempt. He may not be from Hippo, but this Augustine is hip from an early age to the fact that there's no God - and that therefore, in a classic freshman-year spin on Dostoevsky, everything is permitted; hence Augie marches on, conscience-free, through the tabloid trenches (rather fantastically rendered here), dispatching fair-weather friend and foe alike with sneering sang froid. Scott essentially dusts off his lauded turn as the vulnerable asshole in the film Roger Dodger, but even if it feels second-hand, his method still cuts cleanly against the outrageousness of the monologue (with its rapists, harnesses, and big-titted innocents), while respecting Noone's finely-tuned rhythms and beats. Justin Waldman's staging likewise neatly frames the portrayal with video cameras and rear-screen projections, which together insinuate this "confession" is merely another variation on Augustine's obsession with exposure and surveillance (even self-surveillance).

Alas, Campbell's performance slowly turned to soup on opening night, but even if it had simmered till the finish (as it no doubt will as the run goes on), how impressive would Noone's work be? It's hard to tell. Certainly the script grows repetitive, as its fratboy nihilism wears thin, and unfortunately, Augustine's second-act encounter with an intriguing, possibly redemptive figure, Mrs. Wallace (why not Mrs. Ambrose?), devolves into reductive anticlimax. Likewise, despite the script's avowed amorality, we can still make out, across the moral vacuum, Father Flanagan wagging his finger at us. So I'm afraid I'm an agnostic on The Atheist; but with higher stakes in Act II, and a stronger performance from his star, Noone could still convert me.