David Hyde Pierce and Rosie Perez in a scene from Close Up Space
(Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space being given its world premiere by Manhattan Theatre Club can’t decide whether it is a comedy, tragedy or satire. The shifts are jarring and unsatisfying. The play typecasts award-winning actors David Hyde Pierce, Rosie Perez and Michael Chernus in roles we have seen them in before, so that they fall back on gimmicks and tics they have used previously. Ultimately, the evening resembles those absurdist comedies of the sixties and seventies (Scuba Duba; Gemini; The Ritz; Happy Birthday, Wanda June, etc.) which handled such material more consistently.
The title refers to a proof reading symbol, as the hero Paul Barrow, played by Hyde Pierce, is the senior editor at Tandem Books, a small publishing house in Manhattan. It is also a metaphor for what Paul needs in his chilly and distant relationship with his fourteen year old daughter (Colby Minifie) whom he has exiled to a prep school 3,000 miles from home. Hiding under a great many superfluous devices cadging for easy laughs is the tragic story of an emotionally frozen man who has treated his late wife Gloria and his rebellious teenage daughter Harper just as brutally as he has treated the manuscripts that have come across his desk: with sarcasm, aloofness, and a hasty red pencil.
Harper has been a terror for years while her mother, a gifted writer, succumbed to mental illness, and Paul has been unable to handle her before or since his wife’s death. The play begins with Paul receiving a letter from the academic dean of his daughter’s school that she has been expelled for her latest offense. When she arrives unexpectedly, her newest ploy to gain her father’s attention is that she will only speak in Russian, a language that her father does not know. There are oceans between them and throwing himself into his work to assuage his grief at the loss of his wife, Paul cannot see the harm he is doing to their relationship.
Surrounding this story is a series of comic turns about life at a New York publishing company. First, we meet his new intern, “Bailey from Vassar” (Jessica DiGiovanni), who is about as right for Paul’s office as she would be as an astronaut without any training. She puts her foot in her mouth every time she opens it. Then we meet his mainstay and best-selling author Vanessa Finn Adams, an over-the-top Perez, who is given torrents of words to spew at Paul for his razor-sharp edit of her latest work of deathless prose (which both describe as Chick lit.) Finally we meet his kooky and spaced-out office manager Steve (Chernus) who is camping out in the common room in a tent as he can’t go home. Chernus gives the same wry, deadpan performance we have seen him give numerous times before.
All of these encounters are supposed to demonstrate Paul’s inability to deal with people, but as these characters are all so exaggerated in their personalities and in their behavior, it does not have that effect. It also continues to keep the play from its central concern which is the damaged father-daughter relationship. In the hands of a stronger director than Leigh Silverman, Close Up Space might have been given a consistent tone rather than the overblown satire that it ultimately turns into, despite events that tend towards tragedy.
Once again Hyde Pierce plays an uptight, repressed man who uses language to wound, the role that he is most identified with in the public’s mind from his years on Frasier. As his daughter, Minifie is both totally miscast and totally unconvincing as a fourteen year old, but that is as much the script’s fault as it is her casting. Since when do fourteen-year-olds read Russian poetry in the original and get on planes without their parent’s permission to fly cross country? Minifre also seems to be playing an articulate college senior, while her height is against her as girl just entering her teens.
Perez plays yet again another tempestuous sexpot. When she first appears, it seems that she might do it differently this time, but no such luck. DiGiovanni’s Bailey is a throwaway character as the butt of Paul’s sarcasm about the current generation of college students who probably won’t know how to edit a sentence with pen in hand if their lives depended on it.
Silverman keeps the action bubbling along from one improbable occurrence to the next, although the play’s more and more unbelievable events ultimately defeat her. The two successful elements of the evening are the enviable office setting by Todd Rosenthal and Emily Rebholz’s stunning white ensemble for Perez as the author of three best-selling novels. Matt Frey’s lighting suitably establishes the visual mood for the various times of day that the many scenes cover.
Considering that Molly Smith Metzler’s Close Up Space was developed at the prestigious Eugene O’Neill Theater Center during the summer of 2010, it is difficult to explain the shape the play is in. One possibility is that too much work has been done on the script. Another is that it had a far superior staging at the O’Neill.
Close Up Space (through January 22)
MTC at New York City Center – Stage I, 131 W. 55th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212- 581-1212 or http://www.nycitycenter.org