Tag Archives: Samuel J. Friedman Theatre

HEISENBERG

Butcher Alex Priest (Denis Arndt) and quirky Georgie Burns (Mary-Louise Parker) meet in a London tube station in HEISENBERG (photo © Joan Marcus 2016)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 11, $70-$150
heisenbergbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg, which transferred to Broadway last month shortly after his extraordinary The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ended a two-year run at the Ethel Barrymore, might reference the quantum theory uncertainty principle that proves the impossibility of precisely measuring position and momentum at the same time, but there’s no uncertainty that the British playwright is an exceptional storyteller bursting with both position and momentum. Stephens’s Tony-winning adaptation of Mark Haddon’s children’s book was turned into a multimedia marvel by Marianne Elliott. Heisenberg explores some of the same territory, the nature of establishing connections and communication between people, but could not otherwise be more different; it’s a spare, minimal tale directed with a graceful simplicity by Mark Brokaw (The Lyons, After Miss Julie). Mary-Louise Parker and Denis Arndt are magnetic as Georgie Burns and Alex Priest, respectively, two loners who meet one afternoon in a London tube station. Georgie is a forty-two-year-old fast-talking American with a tenuous grasp on the truth, while Alex is a seventy-five-year-old Irish butcher who just wants to be left alone. As the play opens, she kisses the back of his neck, mistaking him for someone else, then starts babbling to him. “Why are you talking to me?” he asks sternly. “I’m sorry. I’m really weird. I know. You don’t need to tell me. I’ll go,” she replies. But she can’t leave; she is drawn to him, sharing intimate details of her life that might or might not be true. When she shows up at his shop five days later, tracking him down through Google, he coldly declares, “My privacy has been violated.” She responds, “‘Violated’ is a bit strong. ‘Violated’ is a bit hyperbolic.” “Nice word,” he says. “Thank you. Ha. ‘Nice word.’ Patronizing fucker,” she answers. As these two extremely particular and rather odd strangers get to know each other, they attempt to fill in the missing parts of their lives.

heisenberg-2

The awe-inspiring technology behind Curious Incident is completely absent in Heisenberg, a streamlined production that relies on basic, almost workshoplike elements. Mark Wendland’s (Next to Normal, The Merchant of Venice) sparse stage features two chairs and two tables that the actors occasionally move around as the scenes change; there is a riser of seats behind the stage, placing the characters in the middle of the audience. Despite the show’s title, Stephens’s script does not delve deeply into physics, although at one point Georgie explains, “If you watch something closely enough you realize you have no possible way of telling where it’s going or how fast it’s getting there. Did you know that? That’s actually the truth. That’s actually scientifically been proven as the truth. By scientists. They all got together and they completely agreed on that. If you pay attention to where it’s going or how fast it’s moving, you stop watching it properly.” Those words also apply to how one can experience theater, including this Manhattan Theatre Club production. There’s no need to pay special attention to where this charming two-actor character sketch is going, or how fast it will get there; just watch it properly, immersed in the moment and the flow, in the lightning-quick pace and dizzying spectacle of Parker’s (Proof, Weeds) splendidly quirky performance or the subtle, sly, sublimely powerful work of Oregon Shakespeare Festival veteran Arndt (The Ballad of Soapy Smith, Basic Instinct) as he almost imperceptibly builds the quietly heartbreaking figure of Alex. “You need to follow it. The melody,” Alex tells Georgie when teaching her how to listen to a Bach sonata. “Try to predict what will happen to it next. It will completely take you by surprise.” The same can be said for this beautifully constructed show.

THE FATHER

André (Frank Langella) doesn’t make it easy for his daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), to help him in THE FATHER (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 12, $70-$150
thefatherbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In early 2014, Frank Langella played King Lear at BAM, a thought-provoking counterpoint to his latest show, the U.S. premiere of Florian Zeller’s The Father. As Lear, the seventy-eight-year-old Langella, who has won three Tonys and two Obies, battled his failing mind and body while two of his three daughters fought over his wealth and power and the third only wanted to love and care for him. As eighty-year-old André in Zeller’s Olivier-nominated, Molière Award–winning play — not to be confused with August Strindberg’s The Father, currently running at Theatre for a New Audience — Langella is an elegant Paris gentleman dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease while his loving daughter, Anne (Kathryn Erbe), tries to care for him despite his mistreatment of her. After scaring off yet another home nurse, André yells at Anne, “I don’t need her! I don’t need her or anyone else! I can manage very well on my own!” But it’s becoming more and more apparent that he can’t, as he gets lost in a psychological maze of the past and the present, not knowing who is who and where he is while refusing to acknowledge what is happening to him, instead turning the tables on those around him. “I’m worried about you,” he says to a woman (Kathleen McNenny) who claims to be Anne but he does not recognize. “Don’t you remember? She doesn’t remember. Are you having memory lapses or what? You’d better go and see someone, my dear.” He also mixes up Anne’s significant others, either boyfriends or husbands (Charles Borland and Brian Avers) who may or may not be moving to London with her. And he compares his latest caretaker, Laura (Hannah Cabell), to his beloved other daughter, Elise, whom he wildly praises while disparaging Anne. “You have two daughters?” Laura asks suspiciously. “That’s right,” he says. “Even though I hardly ever hear from the other one. Elise. All the same, she was always my favourite. . . . I don’t understand why she never gets in touch. Never.” In addition, André seems to be forgetting whose apartment he’s in and whether he’s living on his own or with Anne, which makes him angry and upset. “I don’t need any help from anyone and I will not leave this flat,” he firmly declares. But he’s of course in dire need of help.

André (Frank Langella) ponders his frightening future in Florian Zeller play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Translated from the French by two-time Tony winner Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Sunset Boulevard) and directed by Tony winner Doug Hughes (Frozen, The Royal Family), Zeller’s play, a companion piece to The Mother, uses clever stagecraft to depict André’s heartbreaking descent. Scenes sometimes repeat or overlap, and having multiple actors play Anne and her partners transfers André’s confusion to the audience, which is also sometimes not sure who is who or if what is happening is only in André’s fading mind. Each scene ends with a sudden darkness, and when the lights come back on (courtesy of lighting designer Donald Holder), bits of Scott Pask’s fashionable French-flat set, from books to furniture, have disappeared, echoing the cognitive losses inside André’s head. André is also obsessed with time, as if, deep down, he really does understand the fate that awaits him but is unwilling to face the truth. He keeps thinking someone has stolen his watch, and he continually refers to time. “Time passes so fast,” he says wistfully. Later he opines, “If this goes on much longer, I’ll be stark naked. Stark naked. And I won’t even know what time it is.” Langella (Frost/Nixon, Dracula) goes from bold and confused to touchingly gentle as André, imbuing him with a Lear-like regalness and an aristocratic refinement even when tap-dancing; it’s a beautifully moving performance from one of America’s finest actors. Zeller, Hampton, and Hughes avoid genre clichés or sentimentality, using clever subtlety to tell a very sad, unfortunately increasingly common tale.

OUR MOTHER’S BRIEF AFFAIR

A park bench is the main setting in Richard Greenberg’s OUR MOTHER’S AFFAIR (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 6, $60-$140
ourmothersbriefaffairbroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Our Mother’s Brief Affair, Richard Greenberg’s eleventh collaboration with Manhattan Theatre Club, starts off promisingly enough, but a bizarrely bombastic reveal shortly before intermission derails the rest of this quiet family drama. Tony winner Linda Lavin stars as Anna, a variation of a character previously introduced in Greenberg’s Everett Beekin and played by Bebe Neuwirth in 2001 at Lincoln Center. On one of her many deathbeds yet again, the Burberry-loving Anna tells her son, Seth (Greg Keller), that she had an affair with a man (John Procaccino) back in 1973, when she took Seth to Juilliard for his weekly music class. Although Seth, an obituary writer used to examining people’s lives in death, thinks she’s just making up another story, his twin sister, Abby (Kate Arrington, in her seventh Greenberg work), confirms its truth. Anna’s confession becomes even more shocking when she tells them who the man is, a minor but real person in the Cold War and a figure of revulsion to New York’s Jewish intelligentsia. The name is less than well known enough to require a sort of extended live footnote, so the show comes to a screeching halt as Seth and Abby explain who he is and what he did. Greenberg’s choice of partner for Anna is so head-scratchingly strange that the play simply can’t get back on track.

Anna (Linda Lavin) and her lover (John Procaccino) recall the good old days in Richard Greenberg play (photo by Joan Marcus)

Lavin (The Lyons, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife), at seventy-eight, adds some sex appeal to her role as a mother with secrets of her own that are finally coming out, as she claims once again to be facing the end. Procaccino (Incident at Vichy, Nikolai and the Others), one of New York theater’s busiest, and most dependable, actors, is laden down with playing a historical figure that overwhelms his presence. Keller (The Who and the What, Of Good Stock) and Arrington (Grace, The Iceman Cometh), as dysfunctional gay twins, are expository characters who never quite develop their own personalities. Santo Loquasto’s easygoing set consists of a few chairs and a park bench, where Seth, Abby, Anna, her husband (also played by Procaccino), and her lover go back and forth between 1973, 2003, and 2006, with everyone watching what unfolds regardless of what time period they are from, which is occasionally unnerving. MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow never quite pulls together the time shifts and plot reveals; despite a fine lead performance by Lavin, Our Mother’s Brief Affair — which was originally staged as a slightly shorter one-act in 2009 by South Coast Rep, with Jenny O’Hara, Arye Gross, Marin Hinkle, and Matthew Arkin and directed by Pam MacKinnon — feels more like a short story, or a subplot from another play, unable to sustain itself, particularly because it just can’t support the major twist that pulls the rug out from under whatever possibilities it might have had.

FOOL FOR LOVE

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through December 13, $75-$150
foolforlovebroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

In the published script for Fool for Love, Sam Shepard explains, “This play is to be performed relentlessly, without a break.” And as with many of Shepard’s plays, it is indeed relentless. In a seedy motel room on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Eddie (Sam Rockwell), a former rodeo cowboy, reclines in a shaky chair against the back wall, while May (Nina Arianda), a tall blonde, is hunched statue-like on the end of the bed, her face covered by her long hair, looking toward the ground. At the front of the stage near the corner, an older man (Gordon Joseph Weiss) sits back in a sturdy chair, hands grasping the armrests like the slick hipster from the Maxell commercials. The Old Man and May remain stock-still as Eddie begins talking and makes his way over to May, showing a slight limp. “I’m not goin’ anywhere. See? I’m right here. I’m not gone,” he tells her, and she eventually reaches out and grabs his leg, holding on for dear life. That sequence sets the stage for this seventy-five-minute one-act play about two people who both attract and repel each other, for reasons that become more clear with a surprise revelation about halfway through. May and Eddie have known each other since high school, and they have been on-and-off lovers ever since. “You’re just guilty. Gutless and guilty,” she says shortly before promising to kill both Eddie and the Countess, a woman he might be seeing. “I’m gonna torture her first, though. Not you. I’m just gonna let you have it. Probably in the midst of a kiss. Right when you think everything’s been healed up. Right in the moment when you’re sure you’ve got me buffaloed. That’s when you’ll die.” The ever-confident Eddie is sure that May will ultimately choose to come away with him, despite May’s claims that she has started a new life, dating a normal man, Martin (Tom Pelphrey). Every once in a while, the Old Man chimes in briefly, like a Greek chorus all by himself. “I wanna show you somethin’. Somethin’ real, okay? Somethin’ actual,” he says to Eddie, referring to a nonexistent picture on the wall. A moment later, after the Old Man has settled back in his chair, once again soundless and immobile, May tells Eddie how much she can’t stand him. “No matter how much I’d like not to hate you, I hate you even more. It grows. I can’t even see you now. All I can see is a picture of you. You and her.” We only see what we want to see, remember what we want to remember, mixing fiction and reality in our memories, much like theater itself. For Eddie and May, there’s one thing they can never forget. “You know we’re connected, May,” Eddie says. “We’ll always be connected. That was decided a long time ago.” To Shepard, destiny is a bitch.

Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Fool for Love is part of the series of plays, including the Family Trilogy, that Shepard wrote between 1978 and 1985, consisting of Curse of the Starving Class, Pulitzer winner Buried Child, Pulitzer nominee True West, and A Lie of the Mind. Partly inspired by his relationship with Jessica Lange, Fool for Love is a treat for actors; previous versions have featured such Eddie-May pairings as Ed Harris and Kathy Baker, Ian Charleson and Julie Walters, Martin Henderson and Juliette Lewis, Bruce Willis and Denise Simone, and, in the 1985 Robert Altman film, Shepard and Kim Basinger (with Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man and Randy Quaid as Martin). The original 1983 production was directed by Shepard, who includes extremely specific stage cues in his script. For the play’s Broadway debut, Daniel Aukin (Bad Jews, 4,000 Miles) takes the reins. Tony winner Arianda (Venus in Fur, Born Yesterday) and Rockwell (A Behanding in Spokane, Moon) have a fiery energy together, but their back-and-forth rapport gets repetitive, and you can feel the hands of Shepard (and Aukin) manipulating your emotions too much, especially when Rockwell puts his lasso to interesting use, bringing a little S&M into the proceedings. The story bounces between the physical and the metaphysical, occasionally getting caught within both at the same time. Pelphrey (Guiding Light, As the World Turns) plays Martin with just the right amount of cluelessness, and Weiss is terrifically perverse as the Old Man; while the rest of the action is going on, you can’t help but cast glances over at him sitting in the darkness. Shepard is a man’s man, and Fool for Love is very much a masculine tale; May might get in her digs, but Eddie is really calling the shots as he cleans his rifle and swigs tequila straight from the bottle. Love ain’t easy, and destiny is a bitch, Shepard is telling us. Damn straight.

AIRLINE HIGHWAY

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 14, $50-$130
airlinehighwaybroadway.com
www.manhattantheatreclub.com

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lisa D’Amour (Detroit) channels her inner Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill in Airline Highway, a rapturous tale about a group of lovable luckless losers coexisting in the run-down, dilapidated Hummingbird Motel on a slowly gentrifying Airline Highway in modern-day, post-Katrina New Orleans. It’s the spring of 2014, and the sad-sack denizens of the seedy motel are preparing for a funeral party in honor of their matriarch, Miss Ruby (Judith Roberts), a local burlesque legend who is on her deathbed but wants a big send-off while she’s still alive. Tanya (Julie White), an aging hooker with a heart of gold, is organizing the festivities, getting help from the loud, fun-loving transgender Sissy Na Na (K. Todd Freeman), moody stripper Krista (Caroline Neff), hippie leftover Francis (Ken Marks), jack of all trades, master of none Terry (Tim Edward Rhoze), and longtime motel manager and primary ne’er-do-well Wayne (Scott Jaeck). They all share a familial sense of camaraderie, ribbing one another about their sorry-ass lives, but only to show they really do care. “Why do we gotta wait until we’re in the coffin for people to say nice things about us?” Francis asks. “Yeah, like maybe if those people said those things earlier, we’d live longer,” Wayne adds, to which Krista responds, “Who wants to live longer.” Trouble soon shows up in the form of Bait Boy (Joe Tippett), an old Hummingbird resident who got out three years earlier and is trying to make a new life for himself, moving in with a cougar and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Zoe (Carolyn Braver), in Atlanta. Bait Boy — whose nickname has numerous debated derivations — had been in a long-term relationship with Krista, who is none too happy to see him again, especially since he has brought his stepdaughter; Zoe keeps asking everyone personal questions as part of a sociology paper she is doing for school. “I’m supposed to interview at least three people from the same subculture,” she explains. “Meaning, you live in a ‘culture,’ and you are coming down to us,” Sissy Na Na points out. Bait Boy’s return and Zoe’s presence set things in motion as the past comes back to haunt them all.

Two-time Tony winner Joe Mantello (Assassins, Take Me Out) directs this Steppenwolf production, presented by Manhattan Theatre Club, with an infectious giddiness that is echoed in David Zinn’s spot-on costumes and Scott Pask’s fab set, which turns the drab parking lot of the dilapidated, depressing Hummingbird into a space bursting with life despite the universal lack of hope displayed by the characters, all damaged goods who seem resigned to their fate. But that’s not going to stop them from dressing up and throwing one helluva party. The ensemble is superb, led by Tony winner White (The Little Dog Laughed,), who has been nominated for a Tony and a Drama Desk Award for her lovely, understated performance as Tanya, a street-smart woman who expected more out of life but is making due with the lot she’s been cast. Tony nominee Freeman (The Song of Jacob Zulu) is up for a Tony and Drama Desk Award for his poignant portrayal of Sissy, a caring soul who speaks her mind and loves to have a good time. In her Broadway debut, Neff (A Brief History of Helen of Troy) gives a beautiful, heartbreaking edge to Krista, who is ashamed of what’s become of her, while Rhoze is a riot as Terry, a layabout who should have done more with his life. The play is alive with the energy of New Orleans, as well as its music, highlighted by Fitz Patton’s original score, a fiery take on Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband,” and overlapping dialogue bursting with an intoxicating rhythm. Two late soliloquies are entirely unnecessary, overemphasizing what the story has already shown us about these very believable forgotten men and women living by their wits on the fringes of society. The play takes place during Jazz Fest, but only Francis has ever been to the annual New Orleans celebration, and he doesn’t even go to the main part. “The real fest is on the edges,” he says, just like their existence. There are various Native American legends about the hummingbird, a positive symbol that can represent peace, love, and happiness as well as beauty, harmony, and integrity. Airline Highway has all that and more.

CONSTELLATIONS

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through February 28, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.constellationsbroadway.com

It takes several minutes to get into the flow and rhythm of Nick Payne’s Constellations, a two-character play set in the quantum multiverse, in the “past, present, and future.” Beekeeper Roland (Jake Gyllenhaal) and cosmologist Marianne (Ruth Wilson) meet in a bar, have a brief chat, the lights go out, then they do it again, and again. But each time, something changes — the tone of their voice, the movement of their bodies, their positioning onstage, a word here and there. What at first seems like it might be just a tiresome theatrical exercise turns out to be a captivating, sophisticated exploration of the many roads a relationship (and storytelling itself) can take. Over the course of seventy minutes, there are more than fifty short scenes as Roland and Marianne go through repeated iterations of hooking up and not, discussing their careers, being faithful and unfaithful, and, ultimately, facing mortality square in the face. Once you fall under the spell of the drama’s intellectual conceit, a scene won’t even be over before you’re eagerly anticipating how the next one will be slightly different. Constellations is no mere Sliding Doors rehash in which the protagonists have two choices that will take their lives in alternate directions, nor is it as black and white as the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within,” in which each character has a good and evil version; instead, it posits that there are parallel universes in which Roland and Marianne are interacting at the same time, each one similar but unique — and each one, ultimately, ending in death, something that never changes.

In writing Constellations, Payne — who previously tackled climate change in If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet, in which Gyllenhaal made his New York theater debut — was inspired by the work of Columbia physics and mathematics professor Brian Greene, the superstring theorist and author of the highly influential book The Elegant Universe, giving an intriguing, well-researched scientific edge to the play. While Marianne’s job has her studying the origin of the universe, Roland is a rooftop beekeeper, caring for insects whose very existence might determine the future of the planet. In her Broadway debut, Wilson, whose star has risen dramatically in just a few short years — the thirty-three-year-old actress has won two Olivier Awards and had starring roles in such well-received television series as Luther and The Affair — is sensational as Marianne, combining an innate intelligence with just the right amount of vulnerability. And in his Broadway debut, the thirty-four-year-old Gyllenhaal — who is currently up for an Oscar for his performance in Nightcrawler and has starred in such other films as Zodiac, Brokeback Mountain, and Proof — is a worthy partner as he keeps his character beguilingly unpredictable under the sure hand of Michael Longhurst, who previously directed Gyllenhaal in the Roundabout production of If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet and Wilson in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, when the two were at the University of Nottingham together. The play, which originated in London with Rafe Spall (Life of Pi, Betrayal), who also originated the role Gyllenhaal played in If There Is, and Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky, Blue Jasmine), features a fascinating set designed by Tom Scutt, with lighting by Lee Curran; the actors remain on a central rectangular platform that is surrounded on three sides and above by balloons that represent stars, with different orbs glowing on and off in each scene. Constellations is a challenging, intellectually stimulating and satisfying work, expertly written, directed, and acted, but even with all the thought-provoking science, when it comes right down to it, it’s really just a, er, universal love story, as boy meets girl, then boy meets girl, then boy meets girl….

THE COUNTRY HOUSE

An acting family rips into itself in Donald Margulies’s THE COUNTRY HOUSE (photo by Joan Marcus)

Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 West 47th St. between Broadway & Eighth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through November 23, $67-$125
www.manhattantheatreclub.com
www.thecountryhousebway.com

There’s something all too familiar about Pulitzer Prize winner Donald Margulies’s latest play, The Country House, which opened October 2 at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway home, the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. The show, which deals with a close-knit group of friends and relatives gathering at a country house during the Williamstown Theatre Festival, resounds with echoes of such recent productions as the Tony-winning Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, the underrated Ten Chimneys, the Public’s Nikolai and the Others, and MTC’s own The Snow Geese. It’s a year after the tragic death of Kathy, a beloved and successful actress and, by all accounts, one of the most amazing women ever to step foot on the planet. Her family is honoring her memory at their country house, led by her mother, stage diva Anna Patterson (Blythe Danner); Anna’s cynical, ne’er-do-well son, Elliot Cooper (Eric Lange); her former son-in-law, schlock director Walter Keegan (David Raasche), who was married to Kathy; and Susie (Sarah Steele), Walter and Kathy’s twentysomething daughter. Walter has arrived with his new fiancée, the much younger and very beautiful — as we are told over and over again — Nell McNally (Kate Jennings Bryant), a struggling actress, and Anna has also invited TV superstar and heartthrob Michael Astor (Daniel Sunjata), a longtime family friend who is slumming by appearing at the festival in Ferenc Molnár’s The Guardsman. Margulies (Time Stands Still, Dinner with Friends) channels Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard and The Seagull as all the women flirt with Michael, the cynical Susie chooses not to get involved in the family business, and the condescending and contemptuous Elliott takes issue with just about everyone, writing a play that doesn’t exactly endear him to the others.

The Country House might not shed new light on this somewhat tired subject, but the production itself is excellent, fluidly directed by Daniel Sullivan, who has helmed many of Margulies’s previous plays. John Lee Beatty’s living-room set is charming and inviting, enhanced by Peter Kaczorowski’s splendid lighting, which smartly signals each next scene and is especially effective evoking a lightning storm. The acting is exemplary, led by the always engaging Danner (The Commons of Pensacola, Butterflies Are Free) as the still-feisty family matriarch rehearsing for Miss Warren’s Profession, and Steele (Slowgirl, Russian Transport), who is a star on the rise. Rasche (Speed-the-Plow, Sledge Hammer!) is particularly effective as Walter, a character with a lot more depth than originally presented, and TV veteran Lange (Lost, Victorious), in his first play in seven years, will have you wondering why he doesn’t take to the stage more often. Originally produced this past summer at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. (where Danner, Steele, Rasche, and Lange originated their roles), The Country House has a lot to offer, but it’s a place that’s been visited far too often.