A veteran cast looks at the past, present, and future of the theater in EVENING AT THE TALK HOUSE (photo by Monique Carboni)
The New Group at the Pershing Square Signature Center
The Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre
480 West 42nd St. between between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 12, $100-$120
www.thenewgroup.org
“We need more plays!” Nellie (Jill Eikenberry) cries out in the New Group’s marvelous production of Evening at the Talk House, making its U.S. premiere at the Signature Center through March 12. That sentiment couldn’t be more true, especially if they’re such works as Wallace Shawn’s utterly delightful, deliciously wicked black comedy, one of the most gregarious shows you’re ever likely to see, despite its dark undertones. The audience enters the Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre directly onto Derek McLane’s inviting set, where the all-star cast is mingling in the main meeting room of the Talk House, a club where New York’s literati partied once upon a time. The audience sits on rising rows on two sides of the stage, but before taking your seat, you can mix with the actors, enjoy gummy worms and marshmallow hors d’oeuvres, and sip colored sparkling water from plastic cups. A group of colleagues has gathered at their old hot spot, the Talk House, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the opening night of Midnight in a Clearing with Moon and Stars, a fondly recalled critical and popular failure by playwright Robert (Matthew Broderick), now a successful TV writer. He is joined by star Tom (Larry Pine), composer Ted (John Epperson), costume designer Annette (Claudia Shear), and producer Bill (Michael Tucker), along with longtime Talk House host Nellie and server Jane (Annapurna Sriram), who regularly took great care of them ten years before. There is also an unexpected guest, Dick (director and playwright Shawn), a sad, bedraggled shell of a man who thought he should have gotten the Midnight part that ultimately went to Tom. The show begins with an extraordinary, and lengthy, monologue by Robert, making direct eye contact with nearly everyone in the audience as he fills in the details of who everyone is (and was) as well as what has become of the theater in this ostensibly realistic yet unsettling somewhat parallel universe. “At that time, you see . . . theater played a somewhat larger part in the life of our city than it does now,” he says. “A decline in the theater-going impulse could in a way be seen as a small price to pay for the rather substantial benefit derived from entering into an era that quite a few people would describe as much more tranquil and much more agreeable that the one that preceded it. . . . Because what exactly was ‘theater,’ really, when you actually thought about it?” It isn’t long before Robert discovers that this new era is not quite as tranquil and agreeable as he thought, as Shawn slyly injects some frightening twists that go by all too smoothly, highlighting how increasingly easy it is to accept monstrous horrors in our everyday life. Is this our world? Or a wryly distorted funhouse mirror of it?
Dick (Wallace Shawn) and Robert (Matthew Broderick) reminisce over old times in New Group production of Shawn play (photo by Monique Carboni)
Evening at the Talk House unfolds in a kind of near-future alternate reality where the “walls have ears.” In describing the setting of Midnight, Robert explains that it took place “in a sort of imaginary kingdom that predated history altogether or stood to one side of it, at any rate.” Although Shawn wrote Talk House several years ago, it prefigures the Trump era, as the president threatens to cut arts funding and fiercely battles a free press. “I want the old days back! Where are they? Where have they gone?” Dick, wearing pajamas, his face battered and beaten, says. “The old days were wonderful days! And they were better for me — I mean, personally, you see, they were much better for me.” There’s no room anymore for nostalgia in this world, which has changed so drastically even if not so overtly. Both the old days and the new days seem good for Shawn, who has written such previous plays as Aunt Dan and Lemon and The Designated Mourner, cowrote and costarred in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, and has memorably appeared in such films as Heaven Help Us, The Princess Bride, and Radio Days. In Evening, Shawn’s writing, acting, and direction are impeccable; the play is like a poignant short story come to life, with well-developed characters and sharply unpredictable dialogue. The acting is excellent all around, a mostly veteran cast clearly having a grand old time, glorying in their love of theater even as their characters have experienced its downfall. Audiences can rejoice as well; with shows such as Evening at the Talk House, the theater is far from a thing of the past.
The Incredibles, which nabbed the Best Animated Feature Oscar, is yet more fun from Pixar, John Lasseter’s remarkably creative studio that previously brought us Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., and Finding Nemo. After the crime-fighting family the Incredibles are sued into early retirement and given a new identity in harmless suburbia, Bob/Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) can’t stop protecting the world from evildoers, sneaking away from his suspicious wife, Helen/Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), to work with Lucius/Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson) in defeating evil. But he meets more than he bargained for in Syndrome (Jason Lee), a piece of his past resurrected to destroy him. Other recognizable voices include Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph, writer Sarah Vowell as Violet, John Ratzenberger as Underminer, and Elizabeth Peña as Mirage; writer/director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant) voices fashion designer Edna ‘E’ Mode. Pixar fans will also want to check out the exhibition 
Woody Allen’s Manhattan opens with one of the most beautiful tributes ever made to the Big Apple, a lovingly filmed black-and-white architectural tour set to the beautiful sounds of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Once again collaborating with screenwriter Marshall Brickman, master cinematographer Gordon Willis, and Oscar-winning actress Diane Keaton, Allen’s tale of a nebbishy forty-two-year-old two-time divorcee who takes up with a seventeen-year-old ingénue (Mariel Hemingway) is both hysterically funny and romantically poignant, filled with classic dialogue (Yale: “You think you’re God.” Isaac: “I gotta model myself after someone.”) and iconic shots of city landmarks. After quitting his job as a successful television writer, Isaac moves to Brooklyn, where he has to cope with brown water and expensive taxi rides, among other dispiriting things. Meanwhile, against his better judgment, he develops a liking for the elitist snob Mary Wilkie (Keaton), who is seeing his best friend, the married Yale (Michael Murphy); calls her therapist Donnie; and counts among the overrated Carl Jung, Lenny Bruce, Norman Mailer, and van Gogh, which she pronounces “van Goch.” And then he has to deal with one of his ex-wives (Meryl Streep), who left him for another woman (Ann Byrne) and is writing an intimate account of their failed marriage. Of course, it’s impossible to watch Manhattan without thinking about Allen’s relationship with Soon Yi (they’ve now been together for nearly two dozen years), but if you get past that, you’ll rediscover a wonderful, intelligent comedy about men and women neatly wrapped up in a gorgeous love letter to Gotham. “He adored New York City, he idolized it all out of proportion — no, make that, he romanticized it all out of proportion,” Isaac says at the beginning of the film, which was nominated for two Oscars (Hemingway as Best Supporting Actress and Allen and Brickman for Best Original Screenplay).
Jesse Eisenberg stars as a lonely, timid young man trapped in an existential nightmare with his mirror-image doppelgänger in Richard Ayoade’s brilliant sophomore feature, The Double, a dark, imaginative adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, itself a riff on the work of Nikolai Gogol. “It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning when Titular Concillor Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin woke from a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes completely. He lay motionless in bed, however, for a couple of minutes more, like a man who is not yet quite sure whether he is awake or still asleep, and whether what is happening around him is real and actual or only the continuation of his disordered dreams,” Dostoyevsky’s tale begins, and Ayoade (Submarine) captures that confusion with respectful nods to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Orson Welles’s Kafka adaptation, The Trial, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville, and David Lynch’s Eraserhead. Eisenberg (The Social Network, The Squid and the Whale) is first seen as James Simon, an intelligent but absurdly shy office drone who has trouble dealing with people; he spies on coworker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska) through a telescope, fumbles his words whenever his boss (Wallace Shawn) comes around, remains utterly silent when his excellent work goes unnoticed, and doesn’t complain when he is regularly mistreated by a gruff waitress (Cathy Moriarty) at a local diner. Even the elevator and his mother (Phyllis Somerville) don’t like him. As his identity continues to shrink, he is blindsided by the arrival of Simon James (Eisenberg), who is everything James Simon isn’t: suave, sophisticated, sexy, and ambitious, willing to say or do whatever it takes to get ahead at the office — and into young women’s apartments. 
