There used to be a show called A Couple of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking. This show could be called A Bunch of White People Sitting Around Kvetching. Alternately it could be called The Light in the Piazza in the Dark in the Catskills With No Music.
In The Light on the Piazza, the show over which everyone in New York except my date and I went gaga, a woman takes her twenty-something daughter to Italy in the early 1960's. The mother is doing this because her daughter is not normal, having been kicked in the head by a pony (I’m not kidding), and who knows when the chance might come again for a few months of sun and sightseeing? When the daughter falls in love with a nice Italian boy, the mother decides to let the two of them get married because the guy adores her daughter and is rich as Croesus. The dim daughter will fare better in Italy than in the glare of NYC.
In The American Plan, we again have a mother-daughter duo, only this mother does not want her daughter to marry a-n-y-o-n-e. The daughter is unusual. She is delicate. She also flips out every once in awhile. None of this is explained; we just get to watch. We also get to see a few episodes of the mother destroying a budding romance. Again, we never know why Moms takes a turn to the dark side like some Hitchcock villain crossed with the Wicked Witch. She just does. And because we never find out why anything is happening, we fail to care about these people, so our visit to the theater ends up being kind of pointless, which is pointless.
The fault, dear Brutus, can be laid at the feet of the playwright, Richard Greenberg. There is nothing a cast can do when the script is unable to sit up and take nourishment. All they can do is pitch in like a hospice staff, making the patient as comfortable as it can be while it wraps itself around the sound of its own voice. While Dirty Dancing is going on over on one side of the lake, this sad story stagnates on the other, and, in the author’s words, becomes “an intricately unhappy life lived out in compensatory splendor.”
Article comments