"The Understudy' at the Wilma (1st review)

Are you fed up with plays and movies about lawyers, bankers, accountants and real estate brokers? Just once, wouldn't you like to see a show about putting on a show? Granted, actors aren't important in the ultimate scheme of things, but would it kill some playwright to create a script about thespians who get so caught up in their work that they can't distinguish between what's acting and what's real?

That straitjacket won't be necessary, nurse. I'll go quietly.

The Understudy, the latest comedy by the prolific and much-acclaimed Theresa Rebeck, concerns the tribulations of three frustrated actors rehearsing an absurdist play by Kafka while themselves struggling to survive in an absurd profession:

—Jake (played by Brad Coolidge) is a star of action films who is paid millions to shout "Get down! Get down!" and "Get in the truck!" at victims of fires and earthquakes but yearns to find his serious inner artist.

— Harry (Cody Nickell) is Jake's understudy, a genuinely serious (and seriously neurotic) actor, seething with the knowledge that he'll never appear on stage in this play because he lacks Jake's box office drawing power (under Actor's Equity rules, Harry is paid "not to act"). But then, Harry also harbors concerns about the sainted Franz Kafka's script, which in Harry's opinion could stand some improvement.

— Roxanne (Jenn Harris) is a former actress forced to give up the stage for the more dependable paycheck of a stage manager, a fate that has turned her into a screeching harridan. That she was once Harry's fiancée, only to be abandoned by him on their wedding day, does not improve her disposition.

Easy target

In Rebeck's hands, The Understudy provides 100 uninterrupted and frequently uproarious minutes of razor-sharp dialogue and sophisticated insight into life behind the curtain. Rebeck hits her target early and often, even if it's a terribly easy, obvious and tired target. To her credit, Rebeck's three characters are not stereotypes but real people capable of evolving and eliciting our empathy, not just our laughter.

Also to her credit, and with a generous assist from director David Kennedy, Rebeck gives her actors the opportunity to do what her characters wish they could do: contribute their own interpretations to the playwright's words. To a large extent, The Understudy is an actor's dream assignment; the facial and vocal contortions of Nickell and Harris, in particular, take the dialogue to levels that Rebeck could only dream about.

One intriguing question

The script also affords the Wilma Theater the opportunity to make the most of its state-of-the-art stage capabilities, as backdrops and props appear and disappear willy-nilly at the behest of an unseen (and presumably stoned) stage manager. In short, this production of The Understudy is first-rate in every respect except the one that matters most: originality.

The Understudy does pose an intriguing question, to wit: What happens when actors get ideas of their own about the dialogue written for them? But playwrights have been posing that sort of question at least since Pirandello. The much more intriguing question, to me, is: What happens when anyone gets ideas about how his or her job ought to be performed? And why do playwrights persist in confining themselves to their own narrow theatrical world?

The Understudy got me thinking, for example, of a news story I once read about a North Korean woman who was honored by the state as an exemplary office worker because she did exactly as she was told. When she escaped to South Korea a few years later, she was fired from her first job— because she failed to show any individual initiative. What playwright could ask for a more potentially tragic or comic situation?

The forgotten relief pitcher

You want a play about understudies? Consider the plight of Major League Baseball's relief pitchers— those underpaid, underappreciated wretches who labor in the shadows of the glorified starters, never knowing when they'll be dropped into a tense situation not of their own making, only to face a batter or two before being yanked back into the obscurity of the bullpen.

According to baseball lore, virtually the only predictable period in the history of relief pitching occurred in the '60s, the heyday of the great Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax. Because Koufax seemed to finish almost every game he started, the Dodgers' relievers developed a habit of going out drinking the night before he was scheduled to pitch, secure in the knowledge that they could sleep off their hangovers in the bullpen the next day. On one rare occasion when Koufax got into trouble, the Dodgers' manager Walter Alston came out to the mound to confer with his star.

"How do you feel, Sandy?" Alston asked.

"To tell you the truth," Koufax replied, "I feel a lot better than the two guys you have warming up."

Here's my plea to playwrights, especially good ones like Theresa Rebeck: Get out of the theater more often— if not to Korea, then at least to a ball game. It might broaden your perspective.♦


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
To read another comment by Jackie Atkins, click here.