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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

Do the wrong thing

September 16, 2016 by Terry Teachout

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, I review a regional revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s Lobby Hero. I also take note of the off-Broadway transfer of the Berkshire Theatre Group revival of Fiorello!, whose original run I reviewed in June. Here’s an excerpt.

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Kenneth Lonergan is having a very good year. “Hold On to Me Darling,” his first play since 2012, opened off Broadway in March, and “Manchester by the Sea,” his first film since 2011, will be released in November. Would that he were more prolific, but everything Mr. Lonergan does is worth waiting for, and worth revisiting. That’s why I went down to Tysons, a suburb of Washington, D.C., to see 1st Stage’s revival of “Lobby Hero,” in which he rings provocative changes on the simple yet compelling theme with which he has long been productively preoccupied: Life is messy. The results were worth the trip. This enthralling production, staged with absolute assurance by Alex Levy, 1st Stage’s artistic director, is at least as good as—maybe even better than—Playwrights Horizon’s original 2001 version.

040_press_lobby-hero-zf-8127-39031-1-014“Lobby Hero” is a conversation piece that unfolds in and outside the lobby of a New York apartment house. The characters, two private security guards and two cops, get entangled in a tight snarl of mixed motives arising from a murder that may have been committed by the brother of one of the guards….

Things get progressively more complicated from there, to the point where it becomes impossible for any of the four characters to do the right thing without hurting someone else. This being a Kenneth Lonergan play, you know that nobody, no matter how nice or sympathetic he or she may seem at first glance to be, is going to get off easy.

Because “Lobby Hero” is all talk, its success is entirely reliant on the quality of the talk—and the talkers. As always, Mr. Lonergan holds up his end with the discreet virtuosity of a theatrical craftsman who has spent a lifetime paying close attention to the world around him. All four of his characters sound like honest-to-God working-class folk, the kind you could imagine meeting on the subway. So, too, do the members of Mr. Levy’s cast, who seem as unaffectedly true to life as the characters they play….

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Read the whole thing here.

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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