Review: The Scene

The Scene is an utter, total blast. Watching it is every bit as wickedly delightful as a good chick-lit beach read, minus the guilt factor that comes with rotting your brain away on paragraphs about manolos and flirtinis.

As you might know by now, I refuse to write plot summaries, so here is one from Second Stage:

The tale of an out-of-work New York actor — married to a news producer — who has an affair with a fresh-faced Ohioan ingenue and finds himself more morally and spiritually lost than he was before. This black comedy about the ever-elusive “place-to-be”takes on the empty narcissism of American pop culture with bitterly funny results.

I've never been a huge fan of Tony Shalhoub - he's funny, sure, but he always just seems like the obvious go-to guy for the jewish/ethnic idiosyncratic roles. This changed my mind 180 degrees, and if there is a Tony Shalhoub fan club out there, I'm ready to join. Charlie, the out of work actor, is no Monk - he's a guy's guy, goes to swanky parties, and doesn't take bullshit.. that is, until he begins to unravel and lose his way, falling into the ready, waiting arms of the predatory Clea (Anna Camp, who is about to be NY's it girl because of this role). Shalhoub attacks the role with exactly the right balance of quirkiness and down-to-earth, average-joe new yorker-ness. He goes from hot to cold in a flash, one moment chewing up the scenery, the next drawing us into his loneliness and confusion with simplicity and stillness. It's very convincing that this sudden spiral into desperation could happen to anyone, which makes the play very unsettling, and almost scary.

Patricia Heaton is funny and sympathetic as the overworked tv producer whose husband leaves her just as they're about to adopt a child, and Christopher Evan Welch makes sweet lemonade out of what could have been a lemon of a role - the feckless best friend/sidekick/shoulder to cry on/wingman. Anna Camp is the one who really shines in this production. She begins the play with a string of "ohmigod!"s and "like, totally surreal!"s, a dumb blonde of the highest order. In typical Rebeck style, she soon proves herself to be much more intelligent, manipulative, and interesting than she first appears. Each character has expectations of Clea which she expertly uses against them, to getting exactly what she wants. Watching her work is almost like watching one of the alien machines in War of the Worlds - extracting what she needs for survival out of each character, and then abandoning the waste when she moves along. The results are delightfully horrifying.

The Scene takes aim at the narcissism behind much of what we Americans (especially New Yorkers) put so much value on - youth, sex appeal, a tough 'tude, the "right" friends, success, and money. Rebeck is carefully (and thankfully) ambiguous about any kind of "lesson" within the play, and at the end, it seems that the 40-somethings who have slaved their lives away for success are just as lost as the 20-somethings at the beginning of the journey.

Photo yanked from The Times.