Review
After the Night and the Music
Biltmore Theatre
May 27, 2005
Morgan Wycks
mwycks@nyconstage.org
Elaine May's After the Night and the Music has a number of Ms. May's usual wry observations about modern human behavior and its anxiety filled rapaciousness. What she doesn't have is a play. There is a winsome, but wispy curtain raiser and two one-acts; the first is a quartet of interconnecting monologues, the second is a forced piece about wife-swapping.
The curtain raiser concerns a geek loser in a dance club who arm-twists a reluctant mannish lesbian onto the floor where he dazzlingly teaches her to glide and almost fly. The obvious lesson: do use your fingers with a dyke.
Giving Up Smoking reveals that despite the wisdom that comes with age and the designer drugs that help that wisdom to get there faster, humans still succumb to the inanities revolving around the need for relationships and contact with the species. Three 40 - 50 somethings give us their accounts of being alone and the terrible things they'll do to change or not change that status. When the fourth member of this quartet shows up, she is an elderly woman at death's door and though she initially puts the pettiness of the others to shame, we discover that she too can't wait to meet her mate in the after-life.
Swing Time is an embarrassing retro work about two couples with a long friendship who wish to explore the possibilities of swapping partners. In 1969, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice were leagues ahead of this group and the unseemliness of the topic seems even more so with a lame twist of the friendship's priorities. Though I'm sure there are couples out there like these, I'm not sure what Ms. May intended since a point of view is missing. It's a shame about Ms. May - she can still lob a few zingers but I think it's time she do cartoons for the New Yorker.
The talented cast can't be faulted. Eddie Korbich is delightful in the curtain raiser and Jeannie Berlin (who has become a clone of her mother) has impeccable comic timing. J. Smith-Cameron and Jere Burns race through their final paces as if they know the material is bad but otherwise, along with Brian Kerwin, acquit themselves adeptly. The production feels like director Daniel Sullivan, who's not having one of his better years, threw in the towel.
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