Man from Nebraska

C

Four years before Tracy Letts wrote Pulitzer Prize winner “August: Osage County,” he wrote another play that was nominated for the Pulitzer, this one. After seeing the play, I can understand why it took over 13 years to reach New York. It is a play that will provoke wildly divergent reactions. What some will regard as alternately droll and touching, others will find merely banal and tedious. My own reaction falls somewhere in between. I never pass up a chance to see the work of actor Reed Birney (“The Humans”), playwright Letts or director David Cromer (“The Band’s Visit”). Birney plays Ken Carpenter, a 60-something insurance man from Lincoln, Nebraska who faces a sudden crisis of faith. We see him and his wife Nancy (Annette O’Toole) on a typical Sunday on the way to church, during the service, at a cafeteria, visiting Ken’s physically and mentally declining mother (Kathleen Peirce) at her nursing home, watching tv and going to bed. During the night Ken begins weeping uncontrollably and tells Nancy that he no longer believes in God. His uptight married daughter Ashley (Annika Boras) is less than supportive. Reverend Todd (William Ragsdale) counsels Ken to take a vacation alone. He decides to go to London which he had enjoyed 40 years before when he was in the Air Force. On the flight, he meets Pat (Heidi Armbruster), a predatory divorcee with a taste for bondage who seduces him. At his hotel, he strikes up a friendship of sorts with the lovely black bartender Tamyra (Nana Mensah). Eventually he meets her sculptor flatmate Harry (Max Gordon Moore) and takes lessons from him. Back at home, lonely and depressed Nancy starts spending a lot of time with Reverend Todd’s father Bud (Tom Bloom). Ken’s reception upon his return is uncertain. The play’s episodic structure does not seem organic. Birney, as always, is superb. Mensah is also strong. O”Toole, to me at least, seemed mannered. The set by Takeshi Kata makes full use of Second Stage’s wide stage, with furniture lined up against the back wall brought forward as needed. The top two-thirds of the back wall is covered by sometimes illuminated clouds that are both fluffy and ominous. The costumes by Sarah Laux suit their characters well. Particularly in the first act, director Cromer lets scenes breathe longer than some can easily tolerate. I predict that you will have a strong reaction to the play. Whether it will be negative or positive is the question. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes, including intermission.

Indecent ***

Borrowing from “Shuffle Along,” I could say that “Indecent” might well be subtitled  “The Making of the Broadway Sensation of 1923 and All That Followed.” Pulitzer-winner Paula Vogel has written a complex, ambitious work, “created by” herself and director Rebecca Taichman, about the rocky history of “God of Vengeance,” Sholem Asch’s controversial 1907 play. The melodramatic story of a Jewish brothel owner whose daughter falls in love with one of his prostitutes, the play’s second act contains the notorious “rain scene” that shows the tender love between the two women. The depiction of Jews as pimps and prostitutes and the desecration of a torah in the final scene made the play problematic. After a striking opening image, the present play takes us from Asch’s play’s raucous first reading at a Warsaw salon for Yiddish writers through its success in several European capitals to its move to the Bowery, then on to Greenwich Village. To secure an English-language production on Broadway, the producer, much to the devoted cast’s dismay, excised the rain scene. Nevertheless, inflamed by condemnation by the rabbi of Temple Emmanuel, the city closed the play down after one performance and successfully tried the cast and producer for obscenity. Asch neither protested the play’s mutilation nor attended the trial to defend the loyal cast. Allegedly, he had just returned from a mission to Eastern Europe and was too traumatized by what he saw there to care much about what happened to his play. The transformative power of his play on the devoted cast who perform it for so many years is in stark contrast with Asch’s loss of interest in it. I fear that the present play attempts to tell too many stories at once: the importance of Yiddish literature and especially Yiddish theater, the bonds within a theater troupe, the positive presentation of lesbianism, the fear of encouraging anti-Semitism, the difficulties of assimilation, fragments of Asch’s long career and the tragic loss of a Yiddish audience. The playwright posits a final performance of Asch’s play in an attic in the Lodz Ghetto. The entire cast is superb: Richard Topol is Lemml, the stage manager. The other actors — Katrina Lenk, Mimi Lieber, Max Gordon Moore, Tom Nelis, Steven Rattazzi and Adina Verson — all play multiple roles and succeed in making us care about characters that are not that fully developed. The production is greatly enhanced by a trio of klezmer musicians and choreography by David Dorfman. The set by Riccardo Hernandez is simple but effective and Emily Rebholz’s costumes are appropriate. While there is much to admire in this production at Vineyard Theatre, the many elements did not cohere as well as I would have liked. Perhaps my expectations were too high because of my high regard for the previous work of both the playwright and the director. Running time: one hour 45 minutes; no intermission. NOTE: Do not get front row seats because the stage is very high.