Off-Broadway Review—Bruce Norris’s “A Parallelogram”

A Parallelogram

Written by Bruce Norris; directed by Michael Greif

Performances through August 20, 2017

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43^rd Street, New York, NY

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The cast of A Parallelogram (photo: Joan Marcus)

Although cleverly constructed, the plays of Bruce Norris usually offer little more than surface dazzlement, like his most famous play, Clybourne Park, a Pulitzer and Tony winner that piggybacked on A Raisin in the Sun with unilluminating discussions about race relations.

A Parallelogram—written around the same time as Clybourne Park but just receiving its New York premiere—is a half-baked attempt to merge sci-fi fantasy with the playwright’s usual preoccupations of strained relationships and deconstructing language. Its characters comprise Bee, her boyfriend Jay, their landscaper (and Bee’s future boyfriend) JJ, and Bee’s future self Bee 2—an elderly woman with a remote of sorts who can rewind Bee’s life to replay events with different outcomes—who also becomes Bee 3 and Bee 4 at other moments. (Why not just call her BB and give the names perfect symmetry?)

Norris, who has no particular feel for writing a Twilight Zone comedy-drama hybrid, ends his ill-conceived play with a bathetic speech by Bee about the tiny pleasures in our lives: 

“If just for one tiny little moment I make things nicer—wait wait wait—oh oh oh oh oh oh—so, why not go back to the very beginning and just be nice to people—and yes, it’s true, I’m not a nice person, but they don’t know that! So even if it’s a lie and totally fake and we’re all just deluded and lying to ourselves, still—doesn’t that count for something? At least we can pretend.”

As the above shows, A Parallelogram is two-plus hours of strained whimsy that alternates with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo while it replays events in Bee’s life. After some amusing early moments when Bee and Jay repeat scenes from their relationship, there’s little here penetrating enough to sit through once, let alone multiple times with minor variations.

Still, the cast makes things percolate intermittently. Though saddled by the unlikeable Bee, Celia Keenan-Bolger gives a drolly comic performance, while Stephen Kunken amusingly makes Jay’s repeated lines—despite diminishing returns—sound like they mean something. Anita Gillette’s various Bees (2, 3 and 4) remain delightful even while bearing the brunt of Norris’s hackneyed direct address to the audience and non-explanations for her time-shifting device. Only poor Juan Castano as JJ can’t comically navigate Norris’s surprisingly tone-deaf Latino character, who even says—I kid you not— “Whatsamatter witchoo?”

Michael Greif directs adroitly on Rachel Hauck’s set, which effortlessly morphs from one location to another with the agility the writing lacks. There’s a mild attempt by Norris to address his preoccupation with language when Bee and Jay argue about what the terms “bevy” and “brace” refer to, but even there his heart doesn’t seem to be in it.