Tag Archives: Reed Birney

I’M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD

Ella (Betty Gilpin) and David (Reed Birney) share an unusual father-daughter relationship in new Halley Feiffer play (photo by Ahron Foster)

Atlantic Stage 2
330 West 16th St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $20-$45
www.atlantictheater.org

Theater critics are taking quite a beating these days. In Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play, F. Murray Abraham portrays a snarky critic who wants to feel included at an opening-night part for a new Broadway show. In Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Oscar-nominated Birdman, Lindsay Duncan plays a vicious New York Times critic who can’t wait to eviscerate a former Hollywood star’s (Michael Keaton) big debut on the Great White Way. And now in Halley Feiffer’s I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard, a playwright father (Reed Birney) and his actor daughter (Betty Gilpin) skewer critics right from the start. “They are a sick cadre of pathetic, sniveling, tiny men with micropenises and no imaginations who write out of their asses and who love to tear you down because in truth they know that you are doing exactly what they could never do — that you are doing the only thing they have ever wanted to do — and they are fucking jealous,” David, winner of a Pulitzer and two Tonys for such plays as Gavalt! and Four Questions, lashes out. “You know that, don’t you? How jealous they are? They’re boiling with envy. They want a piece of you. They want in. They wanna get inside you! They wanna climb right in!” That mini-soliloquy, which of course contains more than a morsel of truth, is part of a kind of vitriolic halftime locker-room pep talk David is giving to Ella, who has been passed over for the role of Nina in The Seagull, losing out to a sexy ingénue who, David argues, uses her assets to get what she wants. (Ellas is cast as Masha instead.) Smoking and drinking with a passion, David rips apart theater as a whole, not just critics, barely leaving room for Ella to sycophantically scream back at him such words of shock and agreement (and ecstasy) as “Whoa!” “Wow!” “Right!” “Yes!” and “Oh god!” It’s not a pleasant conversation to listen in on — and one can only hope it’s not based on fact, as Feiffer is an actress (The House of Blue Leaves, The Substance of Fire) as well as a playwright (How to Make Friends and Then Kill Them) and the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer.

Father and daughter investigate the state of their lives and careers in I’M GONNA PRAY FOR YOU SO HARD (photo by Ahron Foster)

I’m Gonna Pray for You So Hard takes place on Mark Wendland’s cluttered Upper West Side apartment set, which runs three rooms deep instead of across, creating a narrow, claustrophobic space that barely contains the fiery emotions streaming out of David and Ella. The second scene is far shorter than the first, almost more of a coda, taking place on the floor instead of the stage, as the set is now the black box theater itself, a transition that is wholly successful. But Birney (Casa Valentina, Circle Mirror Transformations), one of New York’s most deservedly busiest actors — he’s also starring in Feiffer and Ryan Spahn’s upcoming web series What’s Your Emergency? — and Gilpin (Heartless, Nurse Jackie) make for a rather odd couple, forming an unsettling and hard-to-believe father-daughter dynamic that is often difficult to watch. But then Feiffer and director Trip Cullman (Punk Rock, Murder Ballad) tear it all apart in a brash, brutal finale that is actually a disappointing cop-out. I’m Gonna Pray So Hard for You is a relentlessly nasty and bitter play, and although often that works, in this case, by the end, you’ll be praying for someone, anyone, to just lighten up.

CASA VALENTINA

Jonathon (Gabriel Ebert) contemplates becoming Miranda in front of other people in CASA VALENTINA (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 15, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.casavalentinabroadway.com

“Welcome to the Chevalier d’Eon Resort. Welcome to the world of self-made women,” Valentina (Patrick Page) announces in Harvey Fierstein’s sensitive and engaging, if occasionally didactic, new play, Casa Valentina. Fierstein’s first drama in more than a quarter century, following such hit musicals as Kinky Boots, Newsies, and La Cage aux Folles, Casa Valentina was inspired by the true story of a husband and wife who ran a Catskills bungalow in the 1960s where men would spends weekends cross-dressing and acting like women, a safe haven where they could celebrate their feminine side. The show takes place in June 1962 as Valentina, who spends her weekdays as George, and his wife, Rita (a wonderfully sensitive Mare Winningham), prepare for their latest arrivals. Among the attendees are Jonathon (Gabriel Ebert), a shy, nervous young man who will be making his first-ever appearance as Miranda; Bessie (Tom McGowan), a military veteran with a wife and kids who glories in the freedom Casa Valentina gives him; Gloria (Nick Westrate), a stylish woman who looks like she stepped out of an episode of Mad Men; Terry (John Cullum), a septuagenarian who tells Miranda, “You don’t get cleavage. You earn it”; and a respected judge (Larry Pine) who revels in becoming Amy away from his stressful regular life. The guest of honor for the weekend is Charlotte (Reed Birney), a radical cross-dresser who wants the others to join the Sorority, an organization that is attempting to change the public perception of and laws against transvestitism. “I firmly believe that once the world sees who we truly are, there will be no need for deception,” she says. However, membership includes signing an oath against homosexuality, something that makes the rest of the women more than a little uncomfortable.

Charlotte (Reed Birney) gets political at a Catskills bungalow in new Harvey Fierstein play (photo by Matthew Murphy)

Lovingly directed by two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello (Assassins, Take Me Out), Casa Valentina is at its best when it celebrates the joy these men experience by being accepted as women for a few treasured days. The show gets bogged down a bit when dealing with the oath, although it does bring up the critical point that the vast majority of cross-dressers — recent studies put the number around eighty percent — are heterosexual. Even with the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage in America, there are still gross misconceptions of homosexuality, transvestitism, and other so-called deviant or non-normative behavior, and Casa Valentina beautifully reveals how absurd it is for society to restrict and judge the predilections of others. The actors clearly have a blast in Rita Ryack’s lavish costumes and Jason P. Hayes’s glorious wigs and makeup (except for poor Winningham, allotted a frumpy pair of sensible pedal-pushers while the men get to wear fabulous dresses), while Scott Pask’s airy set immediately welcomes the audience into this little-known world. Cross-dressing might be somewhat de rigueur these days on Broadway (Kinky Boots, A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder, Cabaret, Hedwig and the Angry Inch), but Fierstein, Mantello, and an extremely talented and beautiful cast offer a very different take on this misunderstood culture, treating it with humor, intelligence, honor, courage, and, perhaps most important, dignity.

PICNIC

Pulitzer Prize–winning PICNIC looks at a day in the life of small-town America (photo by Joan Marcus)

American Airlines Theatre
227 West 42nd St. between Broadway & Eighth Ave.
Through February 24, $42-$127
212-719-1300
www.roundabouttheatre.org

It’s been nearly sixty years since William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Picnic debuted on Broadway, with Ralph Meeker’s Hal and Paul Newman’s Alan battling over Janice Rule’s Madge; in the 1955 film, it was William Holden and Cliff Robertson with more than just their eyes on Kim Novak. So while the Roundabout’s current revival of Picnic at the American Airlines Theatre doesn’t boast quite the star power of those versions, it is still a charming and fun frolic through a bygone era. The two-hour play takes place in a small Kansas town in 1950s America that is preparing for the annual Labor Day picnic. Local beauty queen Madge Owens (Lost’s Maggie Grace) assumes she’ll be going to the picnic with Alan Seymour (Ben Rappaport), a relatively boring and self-satisfied college student from a wealthy family, along with her younger sister, the tomboy Millie (Californication’s Madeleine Martin), and their somewhat dowdy mother, Flo (Emmy winner Mare Winningham), whose husband walked out on her many years before, leaving her to raise her children on her own. The Owens family lives next door to Helen Potts (Oscar, Emmy, and Tony winner Ellen Burstyn), an older woman who has given up whatever life she could have had in order to care for her ailing mother. To get a cheap thrill, Helen hires a stranger, Hal Carter (Gossip Girl’s Sebastian Stan), to do some yard work for her, barely able to control herself when the Adonis-like man rips off his shirt, revealing his taut, sweaty chest. All of the other women notice as well, including spinster schoolteacher Rosemary Sydney (four-time Obie winner Elizabeth Marvel), who has been dating dull but reliable businessman Howard Bevans (two-time Obie winner Reed Birney). It turns out that Hal is a down-on-his-luck former fraternity brother of Alan’s who has come to town to get back on his feet, but after he is instantly attracted to Madge — and perhaps vice versa — things don’t exactly end up as planned.

Madge (Maggie Grace) shares her hopes and dreams with her mother, Flo (Mare Winningham), in Roundabout revival of William Inge’s PICNIC (photo by Joan Marcus)

In Picnic, Inge, who also wrote such plays as Bus Stop and Come Back, Little Sheba and won an Oscar for his screenplay for Splendor in the Grass, cleverly deals with people’s hopes, dreams, and expectations in this funny, tender, and tense drama that explores the soft underbelly lying beneath the old-fashioned values of small-town America. Surprisingly, the acting is a mixed bag, with Marvel overplaying her part, Winningham underplaying hers, and Burstyn at times seeming to be lost while Grace, Birney, and Martin are more effective. Director Sam Gold (Look Back in Anger, Seminar) makes excellent use of Andrew Lieberman’s charming set, a shared backyard that firmly sets the action in America’s heartland. When Madge is up in her room, applying her makeup in front of a window that looks out on the backyard, the audience is sneaking a peek at her just as several characters are doing, everyone dreaming of the possibilities life holds for us all. In a season dominated by revivals of long-ago Broadway classics, including Golden Boy, The Heiress, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Picnic is a fine addition.