Phones become key for an unexpected reason in Douglas Carter Beane’s SHOWS FOR DAYS (photo by Joan Marcus)
Lincoln Center Theater at the Mitzi E. Newhouse
150 West 65th St. between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 23, $87
212-362-7600
www.lct.org
Two-time Tony-winning diva Patti LuPone pulls off a little magical sleight of hand in Douglas Carter Beane’s otherwise slight memory play, Shows for Days. On the night I saw it, the stage diva, playing a stage diva, exited a scene in the second act by reaching out to an audience member; although it looked like a celebratory handshake or a low high-five, it turned out that LuPone had swiped away the woman’s cell phone, without most of the crowd, including me, noticing it. Only the next day did the story come out and deservedly go viral, following in the footsteps of the Long Island oaf who tried to charge his phone in a fake socket on the set of Hand to God. LuPone’s performance is the best thing about Beane’s play, based on his experiences as a fourteen-year-old boy from Wyomissing, Pennsylvania, who hooked up with Jane Simmon Miller’s Genesius Theatre in Reading, a local company that is still at it. Michael Urie (How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, Buyer & Cellar) stars as Car, a shy teenager seeking more out of his dull suburban life. He wanders into the Prometheus Theatre one day and is almost immediately put to work by gruff bull dyke Sid (Dale Soules), the theater’s cofounder and production manager; by the time he meets the rest of the crew — needy actress Maria (Zoë Winters), oversized African American queen Clive (Lance Coadie Williams), sexy blonde hottie Damien (Jordan Dean), and Irene (LuPone), an Actress worthy of a capital A — he has found the second home he has been looking for. Unfortunately, not everything he discovers makes for compelling, entertaining theater for the rest of us.
Lincoln Center has assembled quite a remarkable creative team for Shows for Days. In addition to Beane (The Nance, The Little Dog Laughed), there’s director Jerry Zaks (Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves), set designer John Lee Beatty Sets (Other Desert Cities, The Most Happy Fella), costume designer William Ivey Long (On the Twentieth Century, Chicago), lighting designer Natasha Katz (The Coast of Utopia, The Glass Menagerie), and sound designer Leon Rothenberg (Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Nance); among them, they have earned a mound of Tony nominations and awards. The narrative, clunky at times, has Car going back and forth between 1973 Reading and 2015 Lincoln Center; the modern-day moments feel more like vanity scenes that aren’t really necessary. When the play focuses on the nitty-gritty aspects of community theater, a motley crew attempting to put on the best possible production with extremely limited resources, Shows for Days has a sweet charm, even though the characters are stereotypes. It’s fun watching them decide how they are going to approach an evening of Tennessee Williams one-acts. But when the plot explores romantic hanky-panky, it loses its focus and becomes far less interesting. The more real the play feels, the better it is, even as the props are revealed to be fake. When the 2015 Car first enters the Prometheus, he says, “Curtained off by the entrance is the tiniest of offices. Desk. A chair. All found in the street. With a telephone — that somehow still works.” He picks up the old rotary phone, showing the audience that it is not connected to anything, yet it soon rings, and Sid speaks into it. It’s a gag that is sure to get a different kind of laugh now, after the events of July 9, when a cell phone made Shows for Days the talk of the town. It’s too bad it couldn’t reach that level of fame for other reasons.