David Hyde Pierce plays a stodgy senior editor in CLOSE UP SPACE (photo by Joan Marcus)
Manhattan Theatre Club
New York City Center Stage 1
Through January 29, $80
www.closeupspacetheplay.com
As Close Up Space begins, senior editor Paul Barrow (David Hyde Pierce) is taking a red marker to letters he received telling him that his troublesome daughter is being expelled from school. Unfortunately, someone should have taken a red pencil to Molly Smith Metzler’s mess of a script. The Manhattan Theatre Club production, running at City Center’s lovely Stage I space, centers on Barrow, an old-fashioned editor more concerned with The Chicago Manual of Style than Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Raising Children in a Difficult Time. Following his wife’s tragic death several years earlier, Barrow has isolated himself from friends and relatives, immersing himself in his work instead of trying to fix his fractured relationship with his teenage daughter, Harper (Colby Minifie). He’d rather spend his time battling with his star author, the demanding, tough-talking Vanessa Finn Adams (Rosie Perez), than dealing with Harper, who suddenly shows up one day speaking only Russian, which unnerves intern Bailey (Jesssica DiGiovanni) while energizing office manager Steve (Michael Chernus), who has been sleeping in a tent at Tandem Books because of a breakup with his beloved pit bull. Barrow might know how to fix fiction, but he’s at a loss when it comes to repairing real life. Hyde Pierce does an admirable job trying to keep the ship steady with the support of director Leigh Silverman (Chinglish, Well), but even the Tony-winning actor (Curtains) seems dismayed by the cringe-inducing ending. Metzler (Elemeno Pea, Training Wisteria, Carve) tries to fill the eighty-five-minute show with absurdist comedy, but the Bailey character is superfluous (as Barrow would say, “Delete, close up space”) and Steve, though likable in general, is way too over the top (“Au — perhaps tone down?”). And though it’s fun to hear Perez (Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune) spout Shakespeare (“Au/Ed — relevance?”) and discuss fiddlehead ferns, her character often feels forced (“Au — necessary? cliché ok?”). Todd Rosenthal’s scenic design appropriately evokes an old publishing house holding on to the past in this modern age, but the rest of Close Up Space is in desperate need of a major revision.