Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers play a trio of siblings in One November Yankee (photo by Matt Urban at NüPOINT Marketing)
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park & Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 29, $75.50
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org
Writer-director Joshua Ravetch’s One November Yankee is literally and figuratively about flying, but the Delaware Theatre Company production, making its New York City debut at 59E59 with Harry Hamlin and Stefanie Powers, never gets off the ground. As the audience enters the theater, the sound system plays pop songs about air travel, and a small screen at the upper left shows videos of early, mostly comedic attempts to soar through the sky. Dana Moran Williams’s set is primarily the remains of a full-size yellow single-engine Piper Cub plane nose down, one of the wings badly damaged. Overwhelming the entire space, it leaves the actors only the cramped margins of the stage for their extensive dialogue and limited movement. In the first act, the plane is a MoMA art installation by Ralph Newman (Hamlin), an out-of-town artist and a favorite in Alaska and South Dakota who has yet to break through in New York. His older sister and agent, an aggressive curator named Maggie (Powers), is giving him a very hard time about it.
Ralph explains that the artwork, which he calls Crumpled Plane and describes as depicting “civilization in ruin,” is based on a real crash in which a brother and sister, and their plane, disappeared. In the second scene, Hamlin and Powers become those siblings, Harry and Margo Preston, respectively, who have crashed in the New Hampshire woods on their way to Florida for their father’s wedding. Like Ralph and Maggie, they are prone to dig at each other and throw hard-hitting barbs as they consider their chances for survival. In the third scene, it is sometime after the crash as hiking sibs Ronnie (Hamlin) and Mia (Powers) discover the plane in a vast forest and look around for clues about its destination, possible passengers, and pilot.
A sister (Stefanie Powers) and brother (Harry Hamlin) huddle together in Joshua Ravetch play about family and flying (photo by Matt Urban at NüPOINT Marketing)
Throughout the eighty-minute play, Ravetch (Wishful Drinking, Chasing Mem’ries: A Different Kind of Musical) makes repeated references to time, smoke and fire, fish, dentistry, hypothermia, and needles in haystacks in a thickly veiled attempt to bring the stories together and make various points about art imitating life imitating art, but extracting compelling continuity and relevance from the narrative is like, well, searching for that proverbial needle in a haystack. Ravetch has made a career of working with older television actors in the theater; since 2006, he has written (and often directed) works starring Dick van Dyke, Shirley Jones, Robert Forster, Brooke Shields, Tyne Daly, and Holland Taylor. Powers previously appeared in Ravetch’s one-woman show One from the Hart in 2006, and Hamlin teamed up with Loretta Swit for the 2012 debut of One November Yankee in North Hollywood.
In this iteration, which opened today at 59E59 and continues through December 29, the sixty-eight-year-old Hamlin (L.A. Law, Mad Men), who made his Broadway debut in 1982 in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! and was last on the Great White Way in 1996 in Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, and the seventy-seven-year-old Powers (Hart to Hart, Die! Die! My Darling!), who has spent much of the last three decades onstage, appearing in such shows as The King and I, Applause, Looped, Matador, and 84 Charing Cross Road, in England and the US but not in New York City, are fine, both looking fabulous, but they are severely hampered by Ravetch’s often simplistic, repetitive dialogue, endless puns, and mundane plot. “The simplicity of the title is reflective of the simplicity of the art,” Ralph tells Maggie. “Tell that to your damn critics if you need something smart to say tonight. Watch my lips: ‘The simplicity of the title is reflective of the simplicity of the art!’ Would you like me to write it down?” Ralph, consider it done.