| . | 02/29/2008
Hunting & Gathering
By: Andy Smith
Laidback Michael Chernus & Indecisive Jeremy Shamos
If you’ve lived in New York City for more than a decade, you probably have more interesting stories about the search for true love and a roach-free apartment than the tiresome foursome at the center of Brooke Berman’s Hunting & Gathering.
Despite the valiant efforts by its small cast, this new comedy, which completes a short run at Primary Stages March 1, offers an extremely long 90 minutes of trite, passé observations about the disposability of relationships, roommates, the Park Slope Food Coop and Ikea furniture, which, at this stage of the game, are about as fresh as wisecracks about the Automat and the 3rd Ave. L Train.
Its failure is sad, because Berman’s heart is clearly in the right place. In the notes included with the show’s Playbill, she rather movingly describes the various relationship and apartment-related incidents which led to this autobiographical show, including a job loss connected to 9/11 (she was freelancing in the towers when they fell).
Perhaps this work gestated too long. Though set in “New York City, the present,” Hunting & Gathering would make far more sense in the pre-9/11 period when brokers took extravagant fees for showing apartments and renting usually required coughing up more money than a down payment on a house in Kansas.
People and Places
The play begins with a slide show by Ruth (Keira Naughton), who delivers a fast-paced, occasionally humorous slideshow of all the places she’s lived in a decade and a half in the city.
This leads the audience into her current situation, a share in the apartment of a man she met very briefly, but believes she might be in a relationship with. Her starry-eyed vision is clouded by Astor (Rag & Bone’s Michael Chernus), her chunky slacker guy friend who lives on the couches of others while pursuing a career in “music and computers.” (again, what year is this, 1977?).
Meanwhile, Astor is helping Jesse (Jeremy Shamos), his married but recently separated brother, move into a new apartment. Jesse, a charming but waffling Columbia lit professor, has what the play’s other characters crave, a lease on an apartment of his own. Before separating from his wife, Jesse had a short affair with Ruth (who still pines for him), but quickly hooks up with Bess (Mamie Gummer), an undergrad who’s auditing one of his classes.
For the next hour and a half, this foursome makes trite observations along with a few minor life changes. Gradually and grudgingly, they move closer to putting down roots.
Walking and Talking, Talking, Talking…
Despite their profusion of words, Berman’s characters are mostly underwritten and her four cast members struggle with varying success to flesh them out.
Accessibly handsome and bright, Shamos (Guttenberg! The Musical) makes an appealing target for the amorous advances of the play’s two female characters. As a piece of real estate for women in the marriage market, he looks like a fixer-upper with good bones and charming features, but his waffling foundation means he may not pass inspection. Carrying the real estate analogy further, “lookey loos” might call the dilapidated Astor a “tear down,” but he offers a better return on investment for anyone with a little imagination and elbow grease. In their roles, both performers are fine, though Chernus’s many tics begin to cloy after awhile.
Mamie Gummer and Keira Naughton as whiny huntresses pursuing & avoiding
Mamie Gummer (effective as an apprentice spinster in last year’s The Water’s Edge) is essentially miscast as a shrewd but intellectually vacuous undergraduate (Columbia must really have lowered its admission standards). Meryl Streep’s daughter struggles to deliver a brief, misinformed discourse on Woody Allen’s Manhattan, contrasting her situation to that of Mariel Hemingway, eventually picked by Allen over the older, but infuriatingly vacillating Diane Keaton. This bit is especially annoying because Gummer’s mom was “like… in the movie” and this obviously intelligent young woman hasn’t yet developed the range to play dumb.
Naughton (The Rivals) comes off best. Whether delivering her mile-a-minute slide show or tapping into repressed anger and righteous rage playing a video game called “Buck Hunt” in a dive bar, she’s believable as a loser who still might learn to stand up for herself.
Leigh Silverman’s direction is adequate, keeping the banter moving at a relatively fast pace, while David Korins and Miranda Hoffman, sets and costumes, respectively, offer up cookie-cutter furniture and slacker garb with no surprises.
Overall, Hunting & Gathering proved a consistent disappointment.
59 East 59 Theater (Madison Avenue)
212 279 4200
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