Dope and glory

[emad]

A star-studded revival of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, about Californians on the edge of a drug-induced abyss, brings a welcome bleakness to New York's cosy theatreland while the hottest ticket in town is Billy Crystal

Matt Wolf
Sunday February 6, 2005
The Observer

Hurlyburly
Acorn Theatre, 410 West 42nd Street
Billy Crystal: 700 Sundays
Broadhurst Theatre, 235 West 44th Street
Sometimes, all it takes is time: two decades ago, David Rabe's Hurlyburly seemed almost impossibly mannered and self-indulgent when it opened Off Broadway. Its subsequent Broadway transfer was fuelled primarily by an A-list director in Mike Nichols and an impressive galaxy of stars - William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Harvey Keitel and a young Cynthia Nixon, pre- Sex and the City, among them. Now, Rabe's play is back in New York, partially revised, in a new Off Broadway production featuring a no less notable cavalcade of performers, starting with Ethan Hawke, Parker Posey, The Station Agent 's ineffably sweet Bobby Cannavale and actor-writer Wallace Shawn.

Well, guess what? As staged by the American director Scott Elliott with the same acumen he has brought over the years to various New York premieres of Mike Leigh's theatre work, this latest Hurlyburly is both the most scorching production to reach New York so far this season and a welcome blast of bleakness amid a sometimes overly cosy theatrical climate. Once again, the talk is of a commercial Broadway transfer, even if it's particularly difficult to imagine a mainstream audience nowadays warming to Rabe's miasma of despair.

In between the two New York versions of this play was Hurlyburly's British premiere, at the Old Vic in 1998, in a production from Wilson Milam that brought Rupert Graves a well-deserved Olivier nomination for best actor. Seeing the play a third time, I am even more persuaded that the text's erstwhile faults - its verbal repetitions and deliberate untidiness, to start with - now seem very real virtues. After all, what is this play about but a community of Californians poised on the drug-induced abyss, who talk a mixture of heightened self-consciousness ('We're testing the American dream of oblivion,' Eddie, the casting agent played by Hawke, casually remarks in between bouts of dope and quaaludes) and blather? Not for nothing would the characters' collective mantra appear to be the elliptical 'blah blah blah'. To co-opt the language of the play, talking sense isn't always paramount in Rabe's landscape; survival, on the other hand, very much is.

It's giving nothing away to point out that not all seven characters make it to the end of a play that, while still lengthy (the press preview ran for three and a quarter hours), is half an hour shorter than Nichols's staging all those years ago. Elliott deserves enormous credit for holding our interest in the play's sometimes fearsome hangers-on. Almost everyone in the cast is a revelation in one way or another, starting with indie-film queen Posey, who, inheriting Weaver's original part as the photographer Darlene, has at last found a stage role that can put her decidedly offbeat glamour to delicious use.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1406751,00.html