McCarter Theater Center presents Christopher Durang's 'Turning Off the Morning News' (first review)

Durang last teamed up with McCarter six years ago for Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, which quickly moved to Broadway and earned the Tony Award for Best Play. It has since become a regional theater favorite, but I find it unsatisfying, awash in lugubrious baby-boomer nostalgia.

The boy next door

In contrast, Turning Off the Morning News brims with barely contained rage. The play opens with Jimmy (John Pankow, at once hilarious and unsettling), an abusive alcoholic truck driver, confiding his plans to commit mass murder. “Maybe I’ll go to the theater and kill people there, then kill myself,” he says glibly. “You’re lucky I’m in the play and not in the audience.”

Even within the confines of fiction, such a line can rattle. The scene grows even more disturbing as Jimmy stalks the stage with a pair of long guns, wearing a porcine mask to obscure his face. In the wake of mass killings — or, closer to home, the recent terrorization of Abington, Pennsylvania, by a resident walking the streets with an AR-15 strapped to his back — the mere suggestion of such violence is unnerving.

Durang understands this fear and uses it to make a point. Throughout much of the play, he doles out humor and obfuscation to leave the audience wondering whether Jimmy could be capable of committing such a heinous act.

Yet Durang never sanctifies the character, who regularly intimidates his wife Polly (Kristine Nielsen) and son Timmy (Nicholas Podany, an incredibly promising recent Juilliard grad). He resists the urge to turn Jimmy, unemployed through his own negligence, into a portrait of white male economic anxiety; he leans closer to a conception of the terrorist next door, lying in wait.

Suburban brawl

But the story goes beyond Jimmy in surprising and satisfying ways. Polly emerges as a classic Durang heroine, a woman in love with God and inflected with absurdist tendencies, outwardly dotty but smarter than she lets on.

Nielsen has been a Durang stalwart since their shared student days at the Yale School for Drama; no one understands his patois as innately. She offers a sparkling characterization of a woman who knows enough to be afraid for her life but still puts her faith and trust in the universe — perhaps to her detriment.

Watch Nielsen’s face light up as she describes the promise of heaven in a spellbinding mid-play monologue. She pictures paradise as a red carpet that never ends, with the now-deceased Joan Rivers standing by to ask who you’re wearing. (Her answer will delight you.) Nielsen seamlessly blends humor and pathos throughout, leading up to a final moment that's both wrenching and outrageous.

The audience also experiences Jimmy and Polly through the eyes of their recently arrived neighbors, Clifford (Robert Sella) and Salena (Rachel Nicks). They form the play’s more outwardly serious bond, as Durang suggests they’ve decamped to this suburb with something to hide. (The set design, by Beowulf Boritt, calls to mind an exaggerated Levittown). Nicks and especially Sella bring a grounded humanity to their roles that can alternately smooth or sharpen Durang’s purposely jagged edges.

Jenn Harris rounds out the cast as Rosalind, a melanoma-prone neighbor who avoids the sun by walking around with a pillowcase over her head. Durang filters the play’s pure absurdity through Rosalind, though the talented Harris never allows the character to come across simply as a punchline.

McCarter chief Emily Mann directs with a steady hand, landing all of Durang’s comic beats while building to a quietly moving denouement. Timely and tempestuous, Turning Off the Morning News shows a playwright at the upper edge of his career who still has much to say and can still unleash a venom that’s toxic and irresistible.

To read Mark Cofta's review, click here.