The Flip Side: NYC Theater Roundup: 'Dead Accounts,' 'Anarchist' on Bway; 'Mother,' 'Civil War' off-Bway

Dead Accounts

Written by Theresa Rebeck; directed by Jack O’Brien

Performances through February 24, 2013

Music Box Theatre, 249 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

www.deadaccountsonbroadway.com

The Anarchist

Written and directed by David Mamet

Performances through December 16, 2012

Golden Theatre, 252 West 45^th Street, New York, NY

www.theanarchistbroadway.com

The Good Mother

Written by Francine Volpe; directed by Scott Elliott

Performances through December 22, 2012

The New Group, 410 West 42^nd Street, New York, NY

www.thenewgroup.org

A Civil War Christmas

Written by Paula Vogel; directed by Tina Landau

Performances through December 30, 2012

New York Theater Workshop, 79 East 4^th Street, New York, NY

www.nytw.org

The fall theater season in full swing on and off Broadway includes superstars like Al Pacino (selling out nightly in Glengarry Glen Ross), along with several “name” actresses and even a dead president.

Butz and Holmes in Dead Accounts (photo: Joan Marcus)

When Katie Holmes signed on for Theresa Rebeck’s Dead Accounts, it was seen as a move by the former Mrs. Tom Cruise to return to the limelight on her own terms. She made a decent Broadway debut in 2008 in All My Sons; but here, playing Lorna, spinster sister of Jack, who returns to his boyhood home in Cincinnati while on the run from his wealthy wife, spiteful in-laws and federal investigators for his financial shenanigans, Holmes is little more than window dressing in a shrill comedy that thinks broadsides aimed at Midwesterners and Manhattanites are hilarious revelations at this late date.

But aside from Norbert Leo Butz—who plays Jack with a manic energy reined in enough to avoid suggesting he’s a straightjacket candidate—none of the able performers does much with Rebeck’s sitcom-flimsy dialogue and characterizations. Judy Greer (Jack’s estranged wife Jenny) cannot overcome a one-note role with her goofy charm, Josh Hamilton (Jack’s childhood friend Phil) has a thankless part that has him awkwardly wooing Lorna in a misconceived rom-com subplot, and Jayne Houdyshell can’t make Barbara, Jack and Lorna’s loving, religious mother, less cardboard.

Holmes’s essential sweetness serves her well, but the entire supporting cast is forced to watch Butz chew scenery (and assorted Cincinnati foods) on David Rockwell’s serviceably bland suburban kitchen set. Director Jack O’Brien tries to spiff things up with between-scene blackouts and Mark Bennett’s moody, out-of-place music which would work better in a tense thriller, not this slight comedy that evaporates as soon as it ends.

Lupone and Winger in The Anarchist (photo: Joan Marcus)

Evaporating even faster is The Anarchist, David Mamet’s new two-hander that is closing on Broadway barely a week after opening, which may be a quick-disappearance record for the veteran playwright. Unfortunately, this 70-minute non-play—devoid of tension, depth and feeling, and wasting powerhouse actresses Patti Lupone and, in her belated Broadway debut, Debra Winger, struggling mightily to create characters out of thin air—fully deserves its fate.

Lupone plays Ann, in prison for 35 years for her role in a Weather Underground-type group’s bloody bank robbery; Winger is Cathy, a prison officer deciding whether Ann will be paroled. The women’s abstruse discussion comprises topics such as Reason, Revenge, Forgiveness, and the Foolishness of Being Young and Ignorant. The Mametian language they speak includes no profanity but much needless repetition. (If the repeated dialogue was excised, the show would end in a half-hour.) Inadvertently, The Anarchist—a play of ideas whose writer-director has no idea how to explicate them—gives its audience a good idea of what it’s like to be trapped in prison for three-plus decades.

Mol in The Good Mother (photo: Monique Carboni)

Gretchen Mol never became the big-screen star some predicted in the late ‘90s in films like Rounders and Donnie Brasco. But she proved an able stage actress in Neil Labute’s The Shape of Things with Paul Rudd and Rachel Weisz, and singing and dancing in Chicago. However, in Francine Volpe’s thuddingly obvious thriller The Good Mother, even the resourceful Mol as Larissa, a single mother of an autistic four-year-old daughter who may have been abused by Angus, a gay, goth, teen babysitter, can’t overcome pedestrian writing.

This is the kind of play where the heroine has her precious girl watched by a relative stranger because she wants to hook up with truck driver Jonathan, whom she brings home, fools around and smokes with even though the girl’s condition is serious, and leaves Jonathan’s loaded gun in a nearby drawer even though she’s shocked when she first sees it. Subplots involving Angus and his father Joel—a psychiatrist who may have taken sexual advantage of high-school age patients, Larissa among them—are awkwardly integrated as Volpe piles on mysterious behavior for sheer effect without cause.

Scott Elliott directs with his usual briskness which fatally backfires here. The lovely and talented Mol and a cast comprising good actors like Mark Blum as Joel simply bang their heads against a proverbial wall for 90 minutes.

Stillman in A Civil War Christmas (photo: Carol Rosegg)

With Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln the serious movie of the moment, it’s unsurprising that Abe would also center a stage play. But the ungainly hybrid A Civil War Christmas by Paula Vogel—Pulitzer Prize winner for How I Learned to Drive—not only has Abe but holiday and period songs and sentimental story threads more appropriate for a Lifetime Channel movie than this sketchy effort by Vogel and her inventive director Tina Landau.

The show has the feel of a high school basement pageant, with a nearly bare stage that stands in for the White House and locales along the Potomac, a lone piano off stage to the left of the audience and an energetic cast of 11 that plays a mix of actual and non-factual folks from Generals Lee and Grant to nameless soldiers, free and slave blacks. Abe and wife Mary Todd are enacted by Bob Stillman and Alice Ripley, both of whom look and sound right, but whose portrayals are continuously diluted by them playing other roles.

There’s a kernel of an idea here: that Christmas 1864 was the last in which the Civil War still raged: peace is around the corner. But it can’t sustain a 2-1/2 hour show, despite Landau’s clever staging and an energetic cast. Of course, the Christmas carols sound beautiful—notably Ripley’s heartrending “Silent Night” as Mary Todd serenades a dying Union soldier in a D.C. hospital—but this dubious pageant shows off Vogel’s historical research at the expense of engaging audiences.