Act II Playhouse presents Donald Margulies's 'Collected Stories'

The 1996 drama explores the changing power dynamics as a mentor and apprentice become colleagues. I missed the original production, but a 2010 Broadway revival felt glib. Another decade shows how badly it continues to age.

Schlock props

Its problems become apparent before the play even starts. Walking into the theater and glimpsing Meghan Jones’s chintzy set, which looks more like new construction in Des Moines than the prewar Greenwich Village apartment it’s meant to be, creates a sense of immediate falseness.

Would the formidable Ruth Steiner (Susan Riley Stevens), iconoclastic short fictionist and lover of legends, actually live here? The digs suggest a cozy sentimentalism: Harlequin Romance, not Grove Press.

Matters don’t improve once Ruth, a professor in a creative-writing master’s-degree program, begins her tutorial with Lisa Morrison (Sarah Paton), a first-year student. Although never stated, the Greenwich Village location and Ruth’s alleged stature imply she teaches at NYU — then and now one of the top MFAs in the country.

But Margulies’s facile ear for dialogue abandons him when he crafts Lisa’s story, a sappy bulimia memoir called Eating Between Meals. Sample line: “I entered into a world of plenty, a cornucopia of temptation, of sustenance and sin, where the music of love was Muzak and anything was possible.”

Yikes. It strains credulity that Lisa would even earn entrée into an august program peddling such schlock, much less immediately emerge as Ruth’s prized pupil. But for dramatic purposes, she does, quickly earning a position somewhere between fawning acolyte and aide-de-camp. By the second act, Lisa has her own collection, a money review in the Times, and Ruth up on her heels with pangs of unwanted jealousy.

Who owns a story?

Much of the play winks too nakedly at its own perceived cleverness. Literary namedrops abound. An unfortunate cohort is described as “a mousy Anita Brookner type.” Ruth casually brings up her friend “Ed” Doctorow. A reference to Janet Malcolm exists only to set up a surefire laugh line: “Life’s too short for the New Yorker!” (Har, har — isn’t it just?)

As questionable as this all seems, matters grow graver once Margulies lifts heavier furniture. A long monologue about Ruth’s decade-long affair with poet Delmore Schwartz sounds even more mawkish and hackneyed than Lisa’s story, awash in purple prose. (Maybe Lisa and Ruth are a case of water meeting its level, after all?) The story does serve a purpose, leading to the play’s great revelation: Lisa will steal it as the setting for her first novel, published as Ruth’s career, and life, are on the wane.

The question of who owns a story, or a memory, is compelling and interesting — R. Eric Thomas addressed it last season in his thoughtful, funny Mrs. Harrison. But here, Margulies writes a check he can’t cash. Ruth and Lisa spend little time hashing out the ethics of appropriation, and the moral gray area seems little more than a setup for a crackling catfight. The scene drips with a straight-male misreading of female relationships.

Jessica Bedford’s direction does little to help. Paton plays Lisa as a naked opportunist — as she listens to Ruth’s story, her overexaggerated facial expressions and strident shrieks of laughter all but light a signpost for what will come. She betrays little remorse when confronted, leading with petulance in her final interaction with her mentor. Rather than a semblance of a fair fight, she wipes the floor with Stevens’s underpowered Ruth.

Collected Stories wraps up neatly, but leaves a lot on the table. What debt do we owe our forebears? Is there, as Madeline Albright once said, a special place in hell for women who betray other women? If you end up standing alone, as Ruth and Lisa both do, are those your just deserts? Don’t expect answers to any of those questions, from the play or this production.