Frank's Home

****
Playwrights Horizons

Charles Isherwood at the Times didn't like this play but I did. So there. Quite possibly the first story about an architect I have ever come across, I was fascinated with all the architect shop talk and the spelling out of what makes a beautiful building beautiful. And I had no idea Frank Lloyd Wright (played brilliantly by Robocop) was such a self-absorbed prick! The crowd of very damaged people writhing at his feet elevated this play to near soap-operatic heights. And that's a good thing! I assume FLW probably wouldn't like this play either. But I did. So there.

6969

A.k.a., too much Internet makes the teenager kill his best friend. Act I features some ambitious direction, and Act II forces Max Rosenak to jump through different hoops simultaneously, but the juggling of personalities in 6969 isn't strong enough to let Jordan Seavey's "ripped from the headlines" story go. There are some gloriously weird moments, and Matthew Hopkins does well to keep all the "chatroom characters" behind transparent scrims, like the messenger windows they are, but something about the show feels flat. It's also one case where the real-life story is so much more impressive than the condensed one that Seavey's been forced to adapt; his version is more poetic and less of a soap opera, but that also gives it the ring of something false. I think the problem is that the show is just too long: the brilliant first act, which sets up John's grand guignol of lies, makes the second act too much of an explanation and takes us out of the illusion entirely.

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Howard Katz

Howard Katz isn't bad theater, but it's not worth seeing. Theatrical masturbation is an effortless craft: it takes nothing to take a shallow character and then punish him for it. The show is at least mercifully swift, although the scenes don't come at our "hero" nearly fast enough for his portrayer, Alfred Molina, to do much with them. Instead, he spends most of the play wading through recycled pity parties that were done better in other plays. The confrontation with the brother? The last-ditch gambling effort? The final telling-off of one's bosses? Where playwright Patrick Marber shines, however, and where Howard Katz redeems itself ever so slightly, is in the base humility it forces him to undergo. This is the same stuff Neil LaBute spouts once a year, although with LaBute, I at least feel that there's a certain level of honesty underneath it all. Here, I really just get the sense of a slick veneer that's been pushed as far as a good actor can, only to discover that's not far enough.

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Frank's Home

Photo: Michael Brosilow

When a performer returns to the stage after years of working television and movies it's often the case that the stage muscles have gone soft. Not so with Peter Weller. As Frank Lloyd Wright, in Richard Nelson's somewhat Chekhovian play about the architect's emotional absence from his primary relationships, he's assured and intense; he gives the kind of performance that makes the audience hang on his every word. He also avoids making Wright likeable in the dishonest, audience-pleasing way: he goes right to the soul of the troubled, complicated tyrant. As Louis Sullivan, Harris Yulin matches him beat for beat.

A Very Common Procedure

***
MCC

This was a serio-comic play about a wife going haywire after the accidental death of her premature baby. Playwright Courtney Baron's trio of characters come vividly to life as they each take turns narrating the events of this tragedy. Well cast and tightly directed this brisk 90 minute production never lost momentum. My one problem was that the central character (the haywire wife...the haywife) just wasn't very likable. Yes, she just lost her baby and I should cut her some slack but the fact that she totally dumps all over her (very likable) husband for most of the play made it very difficult for me to have sympathy for her. That aside, this was a very unique journey of a play and I was glad I went.

Nelson

There's a reason they're called Partial Comfort Productions: every show I've seen from them, from Baby Girl to 'nami, revolves around some disturbed and colorful characters who are thrust into a bleak urban setting and left to fend for themselves. In this offering, Nelson, the titular character is a slovenly, shy, sad man, who may or may not be a serial killer. As portrayed by Frank Harts, he certainly has the air of one, and it's his unique ability as an actor to allow himself to be steamrolled by the supporting cast that justifies the ironic flatness of Joe (the sadistic boss) and Charlie (the angry, entitled friend). I love this company because they always manage to entertain me. I wish that Sam Marks had written a side-plot or balanced out the characters a little bit so that I could care about someone other than Nelson, but I have to say--that Kip Fagan was able to propel us through a 95 minute show without the work seeming threadbare is a real testament to the need of more, clean directors.

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