Thursday , March 28 2024
A sharp comedy by the creator of Fox's New Girl gets an excellent Off Off Broadway revival.

Theater Review (NYC): The Mistakes Madeline Made by Elizabeth Meriwether

Before creating New Girl, the Fox comedy starring Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Meriwether had already mastered the manufacture of smart, insecure female heroines. Her deep comedy The Mistakes Madeline Made, originally produced in 2006 and now in a brief revival by Tongue in Cheek, proves that point as it delves into the psyches of two fascinating women (and the men who love or hate them).

Jake Lipman plays Beth, the comically tightly-wound manager of a rich family’s household office. While trying her best to control an unbalanced and infantile employee named Wilson – absurd, but highly sympathetic as played by A.J. Heekin – Beth is also training Edna, a sarcastic new hire played by the superb and, in this role, almost magically magnetic Shelley Little.

 


Shelley Little and Jake Lipman in “The Mistakes Madeline Made” – Photo by Maeghan Donohue, copyright 2013

 

Offices don’t get much more micromanaged than this one, with Beth obsessing about purchasing sneakers for the family’s little boy and packing his daily snack. Hardly bothering to disguise her sneering attitude towards all the persnicketiness, Edna shifts periodically into memories of trying to help her mentally ill brother Buddy (Jeremy Patrick Hamilton, effectively raw in the play’s one non-comedic role), and into scenes of her encounters with a series of (again comically) stereotypical dates – the sensitive short story writer, the pseudo-streetwise rapper, etc., all played to delightful excess by Joe Mullen.

The action centers around the acutely painful plumbing of Edna’s crabbed, guilt-ridden soul, with the comedy giving way after awhile to a more dramatic and revelatory mode complete with an incipient love story. But Meriwether’s script shows a sure touch that brings us right along through the changes, and together with pitch-perfect performances and Brock H. Hill’s typically assured direction, it results in not only the best Tongue in Cheek production I’ve experienced but the best comedy I’ve seen on stage so far this year.

Within the tiny Bridge Theatre at Shetler Studios, Lipman’s set comes alive. The flashback scenes, in which the disheveled Buddy refuses to get out of the bathtub he’s moved into in Edna’s dorm, is backdropped by a design that suggests both Venetian blinds and a page out of a notebook, so that we’re always conscious of being in the writer’s world. And everyone here, except poor repressed Beth, is a writer of some kind, from Edna’s failed paramours to Wilson with his new love diary and unfinished dissertation on Leibniz. Writing about writing can be tedious, but here it’s the opposite; rather than separating intellectual-minded characters from an audience, here writing stands in for creating your own life. By the end, when Edna finally make a start on that difficult project, we are absolutely delighted for her.

The Mistakes Madeline Made runs through April 13 at Shetler Studios on W. 54 St. For times and tickets visit SmartTix or call 212-868-4444.

About Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Publisher and Executive Editor of Blogcritics as well as lead editor of the Culture & Society section. As a writer he contributes most often to Music, where he covers classical music (old and new) and other genres, and Culture, where he reviews NYC theater. Through Oren Hope Marketing and Copywriting at http://www.orenhope.com/ you can hire him to write or edit whatever marketing or journalistic materials your heart desires. Jon also writes the blog Park Odyssey at http://parkodyssey.blogspot.com/ where he is on a mission to visit every park in New York City. He has also been a part-time working musician, including as lead singer, songwriter, and bass player for Whisperado.

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