| . | 04/09/2008
Almost an Evening
By: Victor Gluck
F. Murray Abraham and Mark Linn-Baker in a scene from Ethan Coen’s Debate
(photo credit: Doug Hamilton)
Filmmaker Ethan Coen is having a very good year. Along with his brother Joel, he co-wrote, co-directed and co-produced this year’s Academy Award winning best film, No Country for Old Men. He is now making his Off Broadway debut as a playwright with Almost an Evening, a sold-out hit at the Atlantic Theater Company earlier this winter. Reopened at Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street for an additional limited run, the play has all but two of its original cast, still led by F. Murray Abraham and Mark Linn-Baker.
At eighty minutes, these three slight one acts are accurately described by their title. The Coen Brothers films, from Miller’s Crossing to The Hudsucker Proxy to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, have usually been genre pieces recreating famous styles of movie-making, and the playlets in Almost an Evening are also in homage to various styles and genres. Coen is excellent as a parodist but he is not yet accomplished at creating original material. As directed by Neil Pepe, Atlantic’s artistic director, the plays are diverting, but they are all one-joke plots, making it almost unfair to describe them and give away their secrets.
The curtain raiser, Waiting, is a parody of such existential exercises as Jean Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Nelson, played by Joey Slotnick, is awaiting his credentials to get to heaven but he must first pass his time in a waiting room with only two magazines and a typist-receptionist who will not be engaged in conversation. As endless time passes Nelson is sent from one bureaucrat to another, suggesting that red tape is to be found everywhere in the universe. Slotnick’s mobile face resembles some of the famous Hollywood clowns, and Jordan Lage, Linn-Baker and Del Pentecost gain much mileage out of brief appearances as bureaucrats hiding behind their desks and their authority. Mary McCann’s speedy typist is one all offices would envy.
Joey Slotnick and Mark Linn-Baker in a scene from Ethan Coen’s Waiting
(photo credit: Doug Hamilton)
The middle play, Four Benches, is a mild parody of spy thrillers. Tim Hopper’s One is a British secret agent who after a caper goes wrong finds he wants out. Dressed in a three piece suit and carrying a bowler hat, One, apologizing for his work, discovers that he has too much humanity for the job he is in. The play’s four scenes take us from a sauna, to a park, to a locker room, which define One’s tiny orbit. As one of its several visual jokes, Coen borrows a gimmick used more successfully in Peter Shaffer’s play, Black Comedy.
The best of the sketches is Debate which uses all nine actors in short quick scenes. In this parody of the plays of David Mamet, Abraham and Linn-Baker enact characters performing in a play in the form of a debate that spills into its on-stage audience. In succeeding scenes, we see a couple of audience members debate what they have seen, then take their argument to a nearby restaurant where the maitre d’, the actors (now at liberty), and their friends are also embroiled in discussions that get out of hand.
Abraham and Linn-Baker are hilarious as actors playing deities, one foul-mouthed in the classic Mamet tradition, the other filled with benign platitudes. McCann and Lage are allowed to be more subtle as the audience members whose debate spirals into a kind of psychological warfare as they take their argument with them after the theater. Hopper as an angry maitre d’ has a tour de force monologue on the telephone, refusing to be interrupted by any of his patrons. Abraham and Johanna Day as his lady friend escalate the situation with their after-theatre spat which turns deadly serious. Although the exchanges are delightful, like all three of these Coen plays, Debate seems like a piece of an unfinished or longer play yet to be written.
Pepe’s direction is as spare as Riccardo Hernandez’s minimalist set design. Both Ilona Somogyi’s costuming and Donald Holder’s lighting design offer visual humor that is part of the evening’s diversions. Ethan Coen’s Almost an Evening is like a meal of hors d’oeuvres. It is fine in itself, but may leave you hungry for more.
Almost an Evening (through June 1)
The Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, 45 Bleecker Street, off of Lafayette Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, call 212- 239-6200 or http://www.almostanevening.com
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