Time Stands Still

Manhattan Theatre Club has done it again.  Last season, they found a great set of collaborators on paper with John Patrick Shanley (of Doubt fame) and Henry Kreiger (Dreamgirls) creating Romantic Poetry.  And it was absolutely, unquestionably terrible.

This time around, Donald Margulies (of Dinner With Friends and Pulitzer-Prize winner Sight Unseen acclaim) comes back to MTC with a rumination on observation.  And once again, its bad.  Instead of just being bad, it is out-and-out misogynistic.  I’m not sure if I only read the play I would feel the same way, but combined with the direction, casting & staging, the play comes across like a Shawn Hannity diatribe.

The first act starts rather gravely.  Laura Linney’s Sarah hobbles onstage, clearly the victim of an accident.  The play very brutishly teases out that she’s a photo-journalist who was working in the Middle East (likely Iraq) when she was caught by an explosion.  Her co-habitating boyfriend of eight plus years, James (Brian D’Arcy James), is a freelance writer who was at one point covering the war himself and he flew over to Europe (where she had been airlifted) to care for her.  Which all makes a lot of sense.

But that sense continues to fall apart over the duration of the show.  She was apparently engaged in an affair with her local support person, her “fixer”.  And there’s some heated arguments about emotional committment, not just sex…blah, blah, blah…relationship problems.  Yet, James wants a “normal” middlebrow life, not the cutting edge journalist life he’s been taking part in with Sarah.  So, he proposes.  Despite a virulent tirade of anger, he proposes to a woman who very, very clearly doesn’t want to sit on the sidelines of news in the world.  The development is entirely inorganic and uncormfortably forced.

Adding to the middlebrowing are Sarah’s editor, Richard (Eric Bogosian) and his girlfriend Mandy (Alicia Silverstone).  Mandy’s apparently supposed to be a young thing, but Silverstone is about ten years too old to play that role at this point.  And Mandy is, hands down, the poorest written major character I’ve seen in a Broadway play in quite some time.  She’s young, hot, sweet, and wants a family.  The ideal woman for a 1940′s man.  Both Richard and James fawn over her mentality ridiculously, and its insulting.

Mandy goes on a rant about how journalists shouldn’t document what they see for others to understand, but should drop their cameras or notepads and help out.  There’s an unfortanately written, sourly sad anecdote about a baby elephant and a sandstorm that is quite sad, but it undercuts the legitimacy of unbiased reporting of circumstances beyond anyone’s direct control.  Its a slap in the face of serious journalism.

This mentality is picked up again in the second act with another rant from Mandy about how an American is supposed to process the journalists’ observations.  As someone who worked/works for a company that does unbiased reporting with journalists documenting the front lines of, among other things, the Iraqi and Afghani wars, I felt personally insulted.  And as an American who doesn’t have the stones to go over there and help out, I appreciate the news and information those journalists provide.  To reduce it to comparison with celebrity journalism or home service journalism demeans the importance of news.

Grr.

Back to the first act.  It ends with the revelation that Mandy’s pregnant & she and Richard are getting married.  Which is then followed by James’s own proposal.  Ugh.  This is supposed to be about a week after they return from Germany.  And, naturally, an accepted marriage proposal leads to sex, but Sarah claims she doesn’t want James to see her naked.  When we all know that someone who’s got a surgically repaired arm and leg needs a sponge-bath, and the co-habitating boyfriend is the person to do that for her.  So he would have seen her, and to suggest otherwise goes back to the 40′s, again.

The second act opens after the wedding, and there’s a horrifically structured attack on theatre that tries to say something (albeit preaching to the choir).  Mandy’s rant about the purpose of news is delivered, and there’s some arguing about the importance of James’s newest piece of work, about the desensitization of horror films, and it all ultimately leads up to the fact that Sarah and James want different things in life.  He, a man, wants a family, a middlebrow life.  She wants to be a journalist, and fights her way back to working condition.

Which would be admirable if it was done straightforwardly, but it wasn’t.  The script clearly looks down upon her, almost blaming her for wanting to work.  There’s another unfortunate development from Mandy, who, after giving birth, isn’t interested in returning to work.  She just wants to be the beacon of housewifery and motherhood now that she’s got a child.  Forgive me while I pause to hold back the vomit.

In the end, Sarah and James split, and James almost immediately finds another woman to marry, who already has a child he adores.  Marvelous, he gets what he wants.  Sarah, though, does get what she wants, her journalism.  Though instead of writing the conclusion to make that a powerful decision, Margulies ends with her languishing in solitude.

I left the theatre feeling so angry at the play for its out and out misogyny and 1940′s gender roles construct.  Just so utterly disappointing.

There is something to be said and discussed about the purpose of journalism, but this just was not that piece of theatre.  You need to respect the institution in order to have a conversation about it, and Margulies showed none.

Despite completely miscasting Silverstone, the other performers were quite good.  D’Arcy James went a little too back row for me, but I think that’s how the role was written.  Linney, always good in whatever she does, is quite excellent, and does what she can with a role saddled with despair.  Bogosian’s role is almost a throwaway, so its hard to judge him.

Overall, skip this play, or you’ll have a face as sour as Linney carries throughout the show.

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