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Life and Death at the Geffen
by James Taylor
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk.
This month, Westwood's Geffen Playhouse is home to two works by women
playwrights about the harsh reality of death. The first, a World Premiere by
Jane Anderson, is titled The Quality of Life. It's a short, relatively cogent
drama about two couples: one dealing with the death of a loved one that recently
happened, the other dealing with the death of a loved one that's about to
happen.
Early on, the play risks becoming a college ethics debate, but as the first act
progresses, Anderson finds her footing, establishing the right balance of humor
and pathos. She sets up the two couples' situation and lets us get to know them.
The repressed feelings of Scott Bakula and JoBeth Williams' as Ohio born-agains
slowly percolate and the cracks in Dennis Boutsikaris and Laurie Metcalf's
extroverted, New Age façade become visible. All four actors elevate the
proceedings with an easy, lived-in naturalism.
The second act doesn't quite know where to go with the scenario. The playwright
offers notions instead of narrative. Luckily, Anderson's notions are tasteful,
diverting and brief. The Quality of Life resembles this year's Pulitzer Prize
winning play Rabbit Hole, seen last fall at the Geffen. Both dramas investigate
the ways human beings—and more particularly, Americans—handle grief. As one of
Anderson's characters says at one point: "people turn stupid around tragedy."
It's a good line made even better by the fact that neither couple ever comes off
as too stupid or too wise about the complexities of life and death. Like Rabbit
Hole, the characters feel real, and provide good roles for the actors to
inhabit; but unlike that more polished work, Anderson's play feels like it's
still searching for the right scenes to make its point.
Anderson may well revise the play for future productions; sadly the other new
play showing at the Geffen, doesn't share this possibility. Third is the last
work by Wendy Wasserstein, who passed away shortly after the play received its
world premiere in New York two years ago. Third is also a play that takes a hard
look at life and death; but, because it is more ambitious, its rough, unfinished
edges are that much more apparent and cause for sadness.
"I wanted to change the world," says the main character, Laurie (played by
Christine Lahti), "but all I did was change the English department." This is
vintage Wasserstein, reducing a major life crisis to a single pithy one-liner.
Third is about how Laurie must face the fact that the battles she once fought
and defined herself by are ancient history—now she is the establishment.
Laurie's self-questioning is also the playwright's self-questioning and what
makes Third interesting is the chance to see an writer genuinely re-evaluating
her own artistic past—as well as the ideologies that helped shaped her voice.
Sadly, this investigation feels rushed. A clumsy subplot with Laurie's father
strains to evoke King Lear and the final scene that wraps everything up in a
nicely tied bow feels maddeningly false. The unintended message of Third, like
the main theme of The Quality of Life, turns out to be that death has a way of
disrupting even the most well scripted plans.
Third runs at the Geffen Playhouse through October 28; The Quality of Life
continues through November 18.
This is James Taylor with Theatre Talk for KCRW.
© 2007 KCRW
