IT’S ONLY A FLOP
There’s a glaring contradiction in It’s Only a Play: Written by the usually crafty Terrence McNally, a 20-time Broadway playwright, this two-act love letter to Broadway theater and its “plays of fools” — depicted in full fratricidal frenzy at an opening night party — utterly mocks its message. The joke is on the bitchy victims on stage and the bloodied victims in the audience. While the play on paper reads as funny, it just doesn’t work on stage, especially with a cast unprepared on opening night, and lines landing with a thud. There are standouts in the cast, Michael Mullen’s costumes are fantastically appropriate, and the set by Jeff G. Rack epitomizes chic Manhattan living, but the cast doesn’t cut the mustard in the realm of farce, something needed for such a shallow play. How can a play be perfectly cast only to sit there with the depth of an opening night program?
What we get in this 2014 updating of a 1986 off-Broadway trifle is not what Moss Hart revealed in his similarly-set “inside” comedy Light Up The Sky — dreamers and schemers lifted by art above their cumulative littleness. No, it’s phony-baloney thespian caricatures, calculatedly silly and stupid. Stunted children, these nasty narcissists and pretentious parasites wax so spiteful and shallow that suddenly the theater world seems like a loony bin for very loud losers. You’d never think this guy wrote The Ritz.
Histrionically and hysterically blaring us into boredom, the usually reliable director Larry Eisenberg creates for Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills a production that is over the top and beyond the pale, sensationalizing and trivializing McNally’s not altogether mindless mirth. As if to prove a little can go too far in record time, the forced result is a reckless roller coaster of industrial-strength implausibility and idiocy.
The contrived, cartoonish setting is a ridiculously busy upstairs bedroom of the Manhattan townhouse of neophyte investor/producer Julia Budder (regal Mouchette van Helsdingen), an airhead clueless at everything but writing checks. Outside, a blizzard rages. Downstairs, Gotham celebrities swarm and snipe. Above, assembled to await the reviews of a new work called The Golden Egg is a rogues’ gallery of stock showbiz stereotypes that were old school in Roman comedy.
Along with two-inch-deep Julia, we meet James Wicker (Todd Andrew Ball), the playwright’s epicene pal for whom the part was written — except that six seasons ago this insecure egomaniac became a hack in a precarious television series. (Nathan Lane played him in 2014, later replaced by Martin Short.) The flash-in-the-pan dramatist, a one-hit wonder, is Peter Austin (Fox Carney), a bilious believer soon to be cut down to cellular level. Wishing each other woe, they exchange hypocritical compliments with Trumpian prevarication.
Adding self-pity to McNally’s witches brew is washed-up Hollywood legend Virginia Noyes (an on-the-ball Cheryl David), a pill-popping, whiskey-chugging, cocaine-snorting pleading lady whose ankle monitor went off during the performance. Her comeback is a fiasco but at least she wants to make good. Not so the fatuous Brit director Frank Finger (Peter Bussian), a much-indulged O.B.E. recipient and clumsy kleptomaniac: Convulsed with the imposter phenomenon, this snarlingly witless wunderkind desperately wants a flop.
Completing the menagerie — and definitely not in this inner circle (a coterie which proves Quentin Crisp’s adage that “Other people are a mistake”) — is peppy Gus P. Head (adorable Joe Clabby), hired help and kept boy on the make. (He throws the guests’ costumes on the bed — which becomes a ridiculous running joke: The casts of Hamilton and The Lion King supposedly arrive in full costume. Really?!)
Finally, the ultimate odd man out — and chief butt of McNally’s unrighteous wrath — is Ira Drew (Jeffrey Winner, who was a ferociously funny as L.B. Mayer in Theatre 40’s Taming the Lion), an amoral theater critic with conflicts of interest you could drive a truck through. A transparently frustrated dramatist who’s crashing this reception before he pans Austin’s rotten Egg, this take-no-prisoners scribe has written 38 plays under pseudonyms so he can corruptly promote them.
The second-act’s predictable calamity is a mendaciously unprofessional pan by Ben Brantley in The NYT, a flagrantly unfunny diatribe that manages to insult everyone in the bedroom without shedding the least light on a paltry play’s multiple fails. (The fact that we never learn what the play was about speaks volumes here.)
Of course, recriminations ensue where before this fractured “family” had taken a sardonic group selfie. Still somehow, after being read the pans and filth in every publication, these demented survivors moronically scheme to replace Egg with new projects as doomed as the turkey that just got roasted.
Here, as the once-persuasive author of Love! Valour! Compassion! frantically hurls seven needy neurotics through three different endings, McNally hits a career low, his exasperatingly unfunny, relentlessly heavy-handed backstage comedy defying gravity as it bottoms out.
Whatever this play intended as a hymn to hope-ridden artists reaching beyond their grasp, what actually transpires is neuroticism, narcissism, and theatrical rivalries all pleasantly poked at without saying much about them as conflicts resolve themselves quickly and predictably. Somehow, I suppose, a diverting evening can be found here, but Theatre 40’s septet can’t redeem this 130-minute hissy fit, a dramatic “disruption” starring drama queens from hell. It’s only a turkey.
photos by Doug Engalla
It’s Only a Play
Theatre 40’s Reuben Cordova Theatre, 241 S. Moreno in Beverly Hills
Thurs–Sat at 7:30; Sun at 2
ends on April 23, 2023
for tickets ($38), call 310.364.0535 or visit Theatre 40
