Broadway Play Review—“The Nap”

The Nap

Written by Richard Bean; directed by Daniel Sullivan

Performances through November 11, 2018

Samuel Friedman Theatre, 261 West 47th Street, New York, NY

ManhattanTheatreClub.com

Ben Schnetzer and Heather Lind in The Nap (photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Bean hit it big with One Man Two Guv’nors, but based on the hot mess that is his latest, The Nap, it’s clear his earlier play succeeded because 1) it was based on a classic Italian play by Carlo Goldoni and 2) it had a bravura turn by James Corden in the lead.

Bean has neither this time around; instead, there’s a gimmick: snooker, a British variation of pool, which not only drives the plot but is also the climax, as the World Snooker Championship final occurs onstage and the play’s ending depends on which character wins.

Bean’s title is a heavy-handed metaphor for his protagonist. Dylan Spokes, a fine snooker player from Sheffield competing in the championship in (you guessed it) Sheffield, tells attractive young cop Eleanor—who, with snooker organization rep Mohammed, explain to Dylan that they need his help against an organized crime ring betting on him to throw a frame of his next game—that shooting the ball with, rather than against, the felt-like material covering a snooker table allows the player to play straight, rather than crooked. 

Bean doesn’t trust his material, so he pads his play mercilessly. For example, Dylan’s father, Bobby, is a wastrel whose only narrative function is to babble on when nothing else is happening. Bobby wastes a good chunk of time trying to remember the title of the movie Moonstruck; not content with subjecting the audience to this unfunny diversion in the first act, in the second act Bean repeats it, as Bobby tries to remember the title to the movie The Grifters, a ham-fisted underlining of what The Nap is nominally about.

The Nap ends with a game of snooker played onstage, which makes for a diverting few minutes, partly thanks to dry audio commentary by BBC analyst voices. (A deadpan “vegetarian” is the play’s funniest line.) But too much of The Nap doesn’t parse, and its willfully benighted characters are far less interesting over the course of two-plus wearying hours than their author believes.

Puerile writing aside, director Daniel Sullivan puts in surprisingly undistinguished work; the cleverness of David Rockwell’s sets and Justin Townsend’s lighting doesn’t arrest how slowly the show crawls along. The cast is unable to transcend Bean’s caricatures, although Heather Lind’s charming Eleanor and Ben Schnetzer’s sympathetic Dylan come close. Unlike his protagonist, Bean plays against The Nap, causing errant shots throughout.