Kate Wetherhead, George Merrick, Marlo Thomas, and Greg Mullavey star in Joe DiPietro’s CLEVER LITTLE LIES (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Westside Theatre
407 West 43rd St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Wednesday – Monday through March 20, $79-$89
www.cleverlittlelies.com
www.westsidetheatre.com
Two-time Tony winner Joe DiPietro has followed up his disappointing Broadway flop, the romantic drawing-room farce Living on Love, with the clever little romantic comedy Clever Little Lies. In contemporary suburbia, Billy (George Merrick) has admitted to his father, Bill Sr. (Greg Mullavey), that he his having an affair with a twenty-three-year-old trainer at the gym. That doesn’t make Dad happy, as Son has just had a baby with his wife, Jane (Kate Wetherhead). Bill Sr. promises to keep the secret and not tell Mom, his wife, Alice (Marlo Thomas), although he admits to his son, “Your mother has this way of extracting information from me,” and explains that he has never cheated on Alice. But Billy continues to defend his actions. “That’s the thing about lying to your spouse — it’s so easy to do,” he says. Of course, when Bill Sr. gets home, Alice, who owns a local bookstore, almost immediately recognizes that something is wrong, and she invites Billy, Jane, and the baby over so she can get to the bottom of things. During a tense evening, everyone is forced to reevaluate their lives and their relationships as they examine their past and look toward the future.
Marlo Thomas stars as a domineering mother determined to fix a family problem in CLEVER LITTLE LIES (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Directed by David Saint, the artistic director of the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, where this and other works by DiPietro have debuted, Clever Little Lies is primarily set in Bill Sr. and Alice’s comfy but cold living room, designed by Yoshi Tanokura. A scene in which Billy drives Jane and the baby in a car in front of a projection of a parkway goes on a bit long, especially because the car doesn’t flow together with the moving traffic behind it. But the cast is solid throughout, especially the seventy-seven-year-old Thomas (That Girl, The Shadow Box), who plays the domineering mother with a secret with a kittenish sex appeal, and the seventy-six-year-old Mullavey (The Last Seder, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), who gives Bill Sr. an understated charm as his simple life turns complicated over the course of one crazy day. The plot and dialogue teeter on the edge of sitcom cliché but have enough twists and turns to keep the play from becoming overly predictable and mundane, particularly when Alice rants about the current state of publishing or shares an intimate story from her past. “When we’re young, we all do foolish things, don’t we?” she says, but not everyone nods their head in agreement. New Jersey native DiPietro has had most of his success with musicals, including Memphis, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, but Clever Little Lies is a fun if slight diversion from those bigger productions, with a finale that will stay with you for quite some time.