TT: All talk, no walk

Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is another triple-header, in which I review Westport Country Playhouse’s revival of George Kelly’s The Show-Off and two New York productions, Daniel Sullivan’s Shakespeare in the Park outdoor staging of The Comedy of Errors and Tennessee Williams’ The Two-Character Play. Here’s an excerpt.
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“The Show-Off,” George Kelly’s 1924 tale of a genial, fraudulent blowhard and the mother-in-law who despises him, used to be one of America’s best-loved comedies. It’s been done six times on Broadway and filmed three times in Hollywood, most famously with Spencer Tracy playing the title role. But just as Kelly himself is no longer remembered save as the uncle of Grace Kelly, so has “The Show-Off” come over time to be seen as an amiable but slight period piece. The Roundabout Theatre Company’s 1992 revival closed after just five weeks, and since then high-profile stagings have been scarce to the point of near-nonexistence. All praise, then, to Westport Country Playhouse for mounting a revival of “The Show-Off” directed by Nicholas Martin (“Vanya and Sonya and Masha and Spike”) that leaves no doubt of the play’s enduring excellence, simultaneously giving Jayne Houdyshell yet another opportunity to demonstrate that she’s the best of all possible character actors.
Never having seen “The Show-Off,” I took for granted from what I’d read about the play that it was an old-fashioned domestic comedy noteworthy only for being good of its kind. It is, in fact, a dark, sometimes startlingly harsh character study of Aubrey Piper (Will Rogers), a ne’er-do-well railroad clerk who brags endlessly about his made-up achievements in order to cover up his own sense of failure. Not at all surprisingly, Mrs. Fisher (Ms. Houdyshell), the hard-headed mother of Amy (Clea Alsip), Aubrey’s fiancée, sees through his rodomontade and dismisses him with the cold-eyed cruelty of a working-class Irishwoman who shed her last illusions long ago….
Ms. Houdyshell’s performance is cold, hard and relentless–you can see how pleased she is by the prospect of seeing Aubrey get his final comeuppance–and most of her fellow cast members give equally believable performances that root the humor of “The Show-Off” in real, closely observed life.
Mr. Martin has been known on occasion to go in for too-easy exaggeration. This predilection may help to explain Mr. Rogers’ acting, which is anachronistically goofy (he reminded me of Bill Murray) in a way that works on its own terms but nevertheless seems out of tune both with the play itself and with the rest of the staging….
The Public Theater has kicked off this year’s Shakespeare in the Park season with a sure thing, a pratfall-intensive version of “The Comedy of Errors” in which Daniel Sullivan turns Shakespeare’s shortest, silliest play into a splendidly festive romp staged in the hectic manner of a Warner Bros. swing-era film farce. Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (who is well on the way to becoming one of our top Shakespearean clowns) are in charge of the lunacy…
“The Two-Character Play,” first performed in its present form in 1975 and rarely seen thereafter, is about a pair of broken-down actors (Brad Dourif and Amanda Plummer) who are touring the provinces in a play called “The Two-Character Play” in which they are cast as a pair of broken-down hermits who can’t get up the nerve to kill themselves. The results are so full of half-digested, pseudo-poetic theater-of-the-absurd burble (“And, oh, God, the air isn’t cold like ordinary cold but like the sort of cold there must be at the far, the farthest, the go-no-more last edge of space!”) as to suggest a parody of Williams written by Edward Albee, or maybe vice versa….
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Read the whole thing here.