The Search for Faith, in Three Plays

Even the weakest attempt at love takes a strange kind of faith. Most of us have enough problems, after all. We grow up and nurse new hurts as they write themselves, inevitably, across our lives. That much can’t be helped. But romance—which always ends in tears—requires our knowing consent. Who needs to put himself in the way of voluntary pain?

Danny (Christopher Abbott), half of the sudden couple at the heart of the two-hander “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea,” by John Patrick Shanley, from 1984—revived at the Lucille Lortel, under Jeff Ward’s direction—doesn’t want to court that kind of suffering. He’s the most explosive version of a guy you’d probably recognize if you’ve been broke and sad in New York. He’s raw and feral and itching to come to blows with anybody who so much as looks at him wrong or asks a seemingly disrespectful question. Early in the play, sitting at the bar where the first act is set, he gets heated at some guy across the room who’s supposedly staring at him. The poor sap’s just drunk and asleep.

The big thing bugging Danny, though, is the impertinent presence of Roberta (Aubrey Plaza), who wants to move past drunken conversation and kick up some kind of romance. Like Danny, Roberta is from the far reaches of the Bronx. (Part of the fun here is listening to Abbott and Plaza trade heavy-tongued pronunciations of the word “Zerega.”) She’s also—again, like her brooding bar companion—tough and troubled and so burdened by the past that she doesn’t seem afraid to die. They share sorrows and heartrending confessions and match each other’s rhythms, but when Roberta suggests—and then basically begs—that they go to bed together, Danny flips, becoming verbally, then physically, abusive. He’s not afraid to “fight everybody in the whole fuckin’ Bronx to get home,” but he knows that the rigors of love entail an even higher sort of risk.

Abbott plays Danny with a soulful brutality. Plaza puts a lot of heart into her Roberta—you can feel, at every moment, her empathy for the character. Plaza usually plays smart, remote, upper-middle-class women who sublimate their anger into humor. Roberta’s wild, self-destructive expressionism feels like new ground for her, and the change in mode and class sometimes fits her awkwardly.

The two actors have a good bit of chemistry, especially in funny moments, but they paper over a lot of the play’s material by yelling. That’s not entirely their fault—Shanley’s play is a jagged wound that has little patience for subtext. The first act, especially, is a performance of pain and self-disclosure that snuffs out Danny’s and Roberta’s subtleties of character each time they threaten to grow. Their personalities and their pain are made almost exactly coeval, with little telling slippage between.

The production is helped along by an interpretive, poetic edge, coaxed into being by the movement directors Bobbi Jene Smith and Or Schraiber, the lighting designer John Torres, and the sound designer Kate Marvin. Between the short first and second scenes (the show runs a fleet eighty minutes), the lights dim to a low glow, the simmering heat of an electric candle, in mixed blues and reds, and Plaza and Abbott engage in a strange angular dance that verges on stage combat. The dancing has moments of silliness—there’s a motif of false slapping that gets old quickly—but it expresses a depth of spirit that the text sometimes fails to reach.

Shanley’s play is best when it leads Danny and Roberta down paths where love and spirituality meet. Roberta—who, early on, tells Danny a secret that threatens to destroy her family from within—describes her pious Catholic mother engaging in abject “whinin’ ” prayer, which she can hear through the walls of her family home. When the play moves into Roberta’s bedroom, you can see a rosary hanging delicately from her vanity. What she wants from life, and from love, barring the seductive impossibility of completely starting over, is absolution. When Danny, in his fumbling way, tries to offer it—by now he’s pushed his boat away from the dock, risking the wave-tossed journey of love—the play ventures, too briefly, into the deep.

In “Scene Partners,” a new play by John J. Caswell, Jr., directed by Rachel Chavkin at the Vineyard Theatre, self-belief—the most embarrassing form of faith—plays out as a noble delusion. Meryl (Dianne Wiest) is an older woman who moves to Hollywood to pursue her dream of big-screen stardom. Her daughter back home can’t stop worrying, and her sister, who lives in Los Angeles, and once entertained her own show-biz dreams, seems quite concerned. The show, which starts almost immediately to devolve into a fractured surreality, is brightly lit, cut quickly between scenes, like a movie, and highly kinetic. Chavkin makes a big mess among the bodies and every now and then achieves something symbolically or choreographically interesting.

Especially fun are the scenes at Meryl’s acting class—that rich field for cringey drama, recently tilled by Bill Hader on his HBO show, “Barry”—under the guidance of a guru-like teacher (think Uta Hagen plus a splash of Jim Jones) played by Josh Hamilton. (Like the rest of the small ensemble, Hamilton has several roles.) As soon as we learn that he is just as enthusiastic about Meryl’s prospects as she is—he wants to make a movie about her life—we start to realize that a lot of the action so far has a shaky grounding in fact: besides being haunted by a history of domestic abuse, Meryl is also showing signs of dementia, and the play’s topsy-turvy aesthetics are a sign of her growing unreliability as a narrator of her existence and the star of her own story.

The show makes good use of video—a big screen sometimes dominates the stage, lending the play an alluring but ultimately false assurance of evidentiary truth, in counterpoint to the increasingly suspect action onstage. Wiest delivers a varied, psychologically rich performance as Meryl, but in the end she can’t rescue a show that is sometimes moving but so chock-full of concepts that it never quite wins your total trust.

In that way, “Scene Partners” is the tonal opposite of a new production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” directed by Arin Arbus—who’s always up to something you want to see—at Theatre for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center. “Godot,” which premièred in 1953, is often set aside as an example of onstage philosophizing, all cerebral existentialism, with none of the comforts of conventional plot. But in the hands of Arbus, along with Michael Shannon, who plays Estragon, and Paul Sparks, who plays Vladimir, the play becomes what it has always been: a thrilling, melancholy, comic slice of life on earth.

Shannon and Sparks play their characters like a comedy team, a sadder and more repetitive Lucy and Ethel. The scenic design, by Riccardo Hernández, is stark—there’s a long, crumbling gravel road winding through the audience. I sat in the mezzanine and looked down on Shannon and Sparks—the view of an impassive God who never shows up but sees all. The spare setting gets filled up by the staginess and the deft timing of two seasoned denizens of stage, film, and TV. (Sparks and Shannon were both in HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire”; in 2014, they co-starred in Eugene Ionesco’s “The Killer,” also at Theatre for a New Audience.)

In their hands, the play is above all about friendship, about how the pyrotechnics of living together—argument and consolation, recrimination and love—are a stay against an often comfortless world. Beckett is even more God-obsessed than Shanley’s Roberta: at one point, Estragon admits that he’s always compared himself to Jesus Christ. Vladimir tells the story of the two thieves crucified with Christ, one of them assured a spot in paradise because of the faith he expresses with his dying breath. Perhaps these two comedians are a bit like those thieves, hanging around in the hope that something nice might happen before the light fails for good. ♦