Quentin Mare, Mary Bacon, Brian Keane, Kelly AuCoin and Kate Arrington
in a scene from Happy Now?
(Photo credit: James Leysne)
Kitty has it all, or does she? She loves her job as a senior executive with a cancer charity. She has a loving husband Johnny who has just changed jobs to find something more fulfilling. She has two lovely young children. She has a best friend, Carl, a gay man who is always there for her. And she and her husband have good friends in his former colleague Miles and his wife Bea, who also have a child in the same school.
At a business seminar, she is propositioned by Michael, a colleague whom she later describes as “an out of shape clown.” When she expresses shock that he goes to these events to pick up women, he reminds her that husbands don’t kiss their wives anymore, and that is where he comes in. When Kitty gets home, her husband fails to kiss her in welcome, and her world starts to go to pieces.
In Happy Now?, Lucinda Coxon’s hit London play, now having its New York premiere at Primary Stages after a run at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is a smart, up-to-date comedy-drama about a working mother who finds that she is dissatisfied with her life as wife, mother, daughter, friend and careerist, like many women today. Tautly directed by Liz Diamond who also directed the Yale production, the cast led by Mary Bacon as Kitty Allison is pitch-perfect and habituate their roles as if they have been these people for years. They know these people intimately and we have the shock of recognition.
The minimal stage design by Narelle Sissons and use of overlapping scenes allows the play to move with the speed of a well-oiled machine. However, Happy Now? will probably make a better film which will be able to depict all of the many settings. Jennifer Moeller’s costumes have the lived-in look of actors wearing clothing from their own closets. The dialogue is smart and clever, and the story’s use of flashbacks is involving. If anything, the play takes on a bit more than it can handle, just like its heroine.
The title suggests the often-heard expression “Are you happy now?” or “Who’s happy now?” and then the play overwhelms Kitty with a myriad of problems: her estranged father is in the hospital with a near-fatal illness and her self-delusional mother, divorced for 20 years, still will not pick up the phone for fear it will be her ex-husband. Her husband has changed to a lower paying job and using all his time to make it work. Miles’ alcoholism is getting out of control and his acid tongue is more and more directed at his wife Bea. Carl who is having a relationship with a man twenty years younger never seems to be able to produce him at parties. And Kitty’s boss Stephanie is out of the office getting chemo, leaving Kitty to do both her work and Stephanie’s.
The play is book-ended by Kitty’s two encounters with the on-the-make Michael whom she runs into at professional seminars. Although the opening sequence goes on a bit too long, it is C.J. Wilson’s performance as the over-the-hill seducer with the gift of gab that you will remember long after you have seen the play. His analysis of modern marriages is right on target and very revealing of how we live now. If Coxon’s play has no answers for the modern woman who wants to have it all, it asks all the right questions.
As Kitty, Bacon is both the center of the play and on stage throughout. Her characterization is intense and sharp-witted, holding the play’s highly charged events together. However, as her problems mount up and seem insurmountable, she becomes quite shrill in her silent hysteria, albeit, a believable reaction. The rest of the cast create quirky, three-dimensional people: Kelly AuCoin as Kitty’s sensitive husband with problems of his own; Quentin Mare’s Miles, acid-tongued and self-loathing; Kate Arrington as his wife involving herself in minutia as she feels herself disappearing; Brian Keane’s upbeat Carl as his own heart is breaking; Joan MacIntosh as June, Kitty’s certifiable mother, giving an indelible portrait as a woman living totally in her own world.
Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? is a scathing indictment of modern relationships, from Kitty’s career-driven marriage to Miles’ alcoholic-fueled marriage, to June’s obsession-filled love-hate relationship with her ex-husband for walking out on her, and finally Carl’s relationship with a man twenty years younger. With a superb cast led by Mary Bacon at its center as the heroine, Liz Diamond’s production puts how we live now on center stage. You may not like all of these people but you know them intimately.
Happy Now? (through March 21)
Primary Stages at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212-279-4200 or http://www.ticketcentral.com