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PTC's "Third' (1st review)
Robert Zaller
Jane Austen was bitchy, too
ROBERT ZALLER
Some years ago, David Mamet wrote a play called Oleanna about a female student who ruins a male professor’s life. In Third, Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, it’s a female professor who, with the most high-minded of intentions, sets out to ruin the life of a male student.
Not to worry: Third is a comedy. All ends well for everyone, except the audience.
Wasserstein started off with what must have seemed like a good idea: to satirize an uber-feminist literary scholar at a tony New England liberal arts school. Every playwright has a bit of the devil in him, and Wasserstein had more than most. She was sending herself up in the character of Laurie Jameson, a politically correct type who manages to be intolerably smug and edgily hysterical at the same time. You’ve met the type: a Camille Paglia without the boots and the riding crop, who thrills to discover in Jane Austen’s letters a man-eater after her own heart, and decides that the hard-edged Goneril and Regan are the heroines of King Lear.
If Wasserstein had just wanted to have a romp— well, Camille Paglia has been passé for about 15 years, and nothing is deadlier in the theater than topical satire whose shelf life has expired. If she’d wanted to write something serious about the deadening consequences of rectitude, she wouldn’t have her heroine stripping down to her bodice at a faculty committee meeting because of a hot flash. Poor Laurie is, in short, that theatrical oxymoron, a tragic figure of fun.
It’s no wonder that Lizbeth Mackay plays her a little like Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, as a character spoiled on principle but nonetheless ultimately dear. There are better choices to make, but no way to square the circle: Laurie just doesn’t work.
The implausibly clever jock
The same may be said of Third, her dramatic foil. That is, Woodson Bull III (Will Fowler), the preppie jock who takes her class and likes to be known, understandably enough, not by his phallic joke of a name but by the genealogical tag attached to it. Third writes a paper on King Lear that is too clever by half, and therefore cannot conceivably be his. Laurie accuses him of plagiarism, and his case is taken up by the aforesaid faculty committee. Third makes the plausible defense that his paper cannot be found elsewhere, and so must be original.
The problem is that members of the student wrestling team who aspire to be sports agents seldom make brilliant contributions to Shakespearean scholarship, and so there is some explaining to do about him. Wasserstein never does that, and consequently he remains a bundle of, if not contradictions, then serious implausibilities. Fowler does his best, too, to gloss over these problems; he’s just a wrestler who happens to like Reggie Jackson, Franz Fanon and Will Shakespeare all at once, and spins off sophisticated exegeses of Lear on the side.
These characters sound familiar
Professor Jameson also comes equipped with a frustrated husband who rides a Harley and drops barbells noisily on the upstairs floors (maybe Third 30 years before?), a daughter rebelling against Mom by running off with a bank teller (proletarian and capitalist all in one!), and a doddering Dad who wanders out alone in a storm and reminds us of, um, class, which famous literary character? Laurie also finds herself betrayed by a junior black colleague whom she’s mentored, but who will return in Act II after successful chemotherapy in a better frame of mind.
Third originated as a one-act play that Wasserstein decided to expand, and the stretch marks show. Never having had a firm grasp on her characters in the original version, Wasserstein allows them to spool and unwind in the second act, and then re-entwine for the comedic ending. Shakespeare was a past master at those sleights of hand, but neither Lear nor All’s Well That Ends Well can rescue this ungainly pastiche.
Note to fellow playwrights: Enough with the Bard already. If you’re not as good as he is, he can really kill your play.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
ROBERT ZALLER
Some years ago, David Mamet wrote a play called Oleanna about a female student who ruins a male professor’s life. In Third, Wendy Wasserstein’s final play, it’s a female professor who, with the most high-minded of intentions, sets out to ruin the life of a male student.
Not to worry: Third is a comedy. All ends well for everyone, except the audience.
Wasserstein started off with what must have seemed like a good idea: to satirize an uber-feminist literary scholar at a tony New England liberal arts school. Every playwright has a bit of the devil in him, and Wasserstein had more than most. She was sending herself up in the character of Laurie Jameson, a politically correct type who manages to be intolerably smug and edgily hysterical at the same time. You’ve met the type: a Camille Paglia without the boots and the riding crop, who thrills to discover in Jane Austen’s letters a man-eater after her own heart, and decides that the hard-edged Goneril and Regan are the heroines of King Lear.
If Wasserstein had just wanted to have a romp— well, Camille Paglia has been passé for about 15 years, and nothing is deadlier in the theater than topical satire whose shelf life has expired. If she’d wanted to write something serious about the deadening consequences of rectitude, she wouldn’t have her heroine stripping down to her bodice at a faculty committee meeting because of a hot flash. Poor Laurie is, in short, that theatrical oxymoron, a tragic figure of fun.
It’s no wonder that Lizbeth Mackay plays her a little like Jessica Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, as a character spoiled on principle but nonetheless ultimately dear. There are better choices to make, but no way to square the circle: Laurie just doesn’t work.
The implausibly clever jock
The same may be said of Third, her dramatic foil. That is, Woodson Bull III (Will Fowler), the preppie jock who takes her class and likes to be known, understandably enough, not by his phallic joke of a name but by the genealogical tag attached to it. Third writes a paper on King Lear that is too clever by half, and therefore cannot conceivably be his. Laurie accuses him of plagiarism, and his case is taken up by the aforesaid faculty committee. Third makes the plausible defense that his paper cannot be found elsewhere, and so must be original.
The problem is that members of the student wrestling team who aspire to be sports agents seldom make brilliant contributions to Shakespearean scholarship, and so there is some explaining to do about him. Wasserstein never does that, and consequently he remains a bundle of, if not contradictions, then serious implausibilities. Fowler does his best, too, to gloss over these problems; he’s just a wrestler who happens to like Reggie Jackson, Franz Fanon and Will Shakespeare all at once, and spins off sophisticated exegeses of Lear on the side.
These characters sound familiar
Professor Jameson also comes equipped with a frustrated husband who rides a Harley and drops barbells noisily on the upstairs floors (maybe Third 30 years before?), a daughter rebelling against Mom by running off with a bank teller (proletarian and capitalist all in one!), and a doddering Dad who wanders out alone in a storm and reminds us of, um, class, which famous literary character? Laurie also finds herself betrayed by a junior black colleague whom she’s mentored, but who will return in Act II after successful chemotherapy in a better frame of mind.
Third originated as a one-act play that Wasserstein decided to expand, and the stretch marks show. Never having had a firm grasp on her characters in the original version, Wasserstein allows them to spool and unwind in the second act, and then re-entwine for the comedic ending. Shakespeare was a past master at those sleights of hand, but neither Lear nor All’s Well That Ends Well can rescue this ungainly pastiche.
Note to fellow playwrights: Enough with the Bard already. If you’re not as good as he is, he can really kill your play.
To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
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