Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “Linda Vista”

Linda Vista
Written by Tracy Letts; directed by Dexter Bullard
Performances through November 10, 2019
Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, New York, NY
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Chantal Thuy and Ian Barford in Linda Vista (photo: Joan Marcus)

Tracy Letts is one of our most interesting playwrights. His best-known work, August: Osage County, is a three-hour explosion of recrimination and venom in a dysfunctional extended family, while his earlier Killer Joe and Bug are even more dark and deeply disturbing psychological studies. If Superior Donuts is a humorously sitcom-like exploration of an unlikely friendship, his last play seen in New York, Mary Page Marlowe, slightly missed the mark in its depiction of events in the life of an unremarkable woman. But his newest, Linda Vista, finds him on far more fertile ground.

Linda Vista is the name of an apartment complex in San Diego where our protagonist, Wheeler, has just moved following ongoing and bitter divorce proceedings with his wife. He has a teenage son, but Wheeler doesn’t seem to care that much about him. What he is good at is self-loathing and narcissism in equal measure. The 50-year-old Wheeler, who works in a camera shop fixing old equipment, contributes condescending, clever, nasty put-downs of friends, coworkers, family and anyone within earshot. It’s all a desperate ploy to keep himself from admitting that he is at fault for everything that’s gone wrong in his life, which prevents him from moving forward, ahead of his many mistakes.

It’s said that Wheeler is at least partly autobiographical; whether that’s true or not, Letts is unafraid to let him shoot his mouth off while shooting himself in the foot with all of his relationships. But despite Wheeler’s orneriness, crassness, and supreme political incorrectness, Letts does have a soft spot for him, giving him some easily attainable women to woo and bed. Wheeler’s friends Paul and Margaret set him up with nice, attractive, bright, available Jules, who promptly falls for him on a blind date and goes back to his place. And, despite the fact that she is only able to have an orgasm by herself, they have amazing sex and begin seeing each other. 

This is not enough for Letts, however; he further muddies the melodramatic waters with Minnie, a pregnant, tattooed Vietnamese young woman half Wheeler’s age, whom he meets in a sports bar, becomes friends with after discovering she lives (rather conveniently) a few doors down and who soon—rather improbably—becomes his enthusiastic lover. To his credit, Letts doesn’t let his protagonist down easily but instead, after Wheeler breaks up with Jules (who, all too predictably, is devastated) to be with Minnie and help raise her baby, Minnie wants out to be near her family and maybe even the baby’s father. 

These contrivances threaten to derail the play, so when Wheeler grovels all too predictably to try and get Jules back, it doesn’t feel completely genuine. Still, Letts doesn’t fully exonerate Wheeler: the final scene shows him perhaps finding his personal bearings again—or is he just making a play for his camera-shop coworker Anita? 

This painstakingly realistic and often laugh-out-loud play is also quite potent for what it omits: Letts smartly keeps Wheeler’s ex and son offstage, forcing him to deal with his new problems, which include estranging Paul and Margaret when he embarrassingly attempts to look hip while enthralled by Minnie’s youth and sexuality. (Letts also suggests Wheeler and Margaret were once an item, shedding new light on his longtime friendship with Paul.) 

Linda Vista is as messy as its protagonist’s life, but director Dexter Bullard’s sure hand ensures that it remains focused, exploring the paths Wheeler sets out on with precision. The dead-on music choices run from Steely Dan tunes during scene breaks to such cornball karaoke-bar staples as Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On”—mistaken by one character for a Huey Lewis song—and Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr’s “You Don’t Have to Be a Star.”

The supporting cast is spectacularly good. Cora van der Broeck is a heartbreaking Jules and Sally Murphy is a superbly shrill Margaret. In the tricky role of Minnie, Chantal Thuy plays it beautifully by alternating between acting coolly and distantly and baring her soul in woundingly intimate moments. As the levelheaded Paul, Jim True-Frost has the play’s best monologue, an hilarious locker room harangue about deathbeds. And as Wheeler’s boss Michael and coworker Anita, Troy West and Caroline Neff amusingly navigate the treacherous waters of sexual harassment in the workplace.

But above all, caught in a storm of his own making, is Ian Barford’s Wheeler, whose torrents of abuse never cease being funny even as they hurt others—and himself. Barford’s brilliantly pinpoint portrayal drips with sarcasm and fury but manages to remain likeable, even charming. Whether haranguing Jules and Minnie to watch Kubrick’s classic film Barry Lyndon—which they promptly fall asleep to—or spitting out “like Elton John on a Shetland pony” to refer to his boss Michael (an image I’m still laughing at), Barford gives the deeply flawed but endlessly fascinating Wheeler one hell of an entertaining midlife crisis that’s at the heart of Letts’ equally provocative Linda Vista.