Will Eno’s ‘The Realistic Joneses’ in New York

My students and I tried to reassure him by listing the handful of premieres on the Broadway boards that season, but Albee remained inconsolable. And for good reason. After all, when Albee got started in the ’60s, producers were willing to risk bringing a new play by an unknown to the White Way, sometimes without even an out-of-town tryout. Witness the young Albee’s own two masterpieces: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1962) and A Delicate Balance (which won a Pulitzer in 1967).

But today, when it costs $2 million-plus just to get a nonmusical play to opening night, producers are understandably reluctant to take the chance. Consequently, the mantle of new play production has fallen on the shoulders of the non-profit theaters– off-Broadway and in the regionals. Which is fine with me but not with Albee, who longs for the good old days when the opening of new play on Broadway was a high-profile artistic event.

All the more reason, then, to acknowledge the significance of The Realistic Joneses, the engaging (if enigmatic) new drama that opened on Broadway this month (after a run at the Yale Repertory Theatre). It’s a work that should have Albee jumping for joy, since you’d swear it was written by Albee himself. Except it isn’t — it’s by a new writer named Will Eno.

Albee’s absurdist plays often involve two sets of married couples, at war with each other and themselves — like George/Martha vs. Nick/Honey in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, or Agnes/Tobias vs. Edna/Harry in A Delicate Balance, or Man/Woman vs. Boy/Girl in The Play About the Baby. (Albee, in turn, got the model from Ionesco — remember the Smiths and the Martins in The Bald Soprano?)

Married? Who isn’t?

Will Eno mimics this Albee model and ups the ante. His play offers two sets of characters, both named Jones. They’re neighbors on some generic American street (Eno doesn’t tell you where, except that it’s a town near the mountains, and, as you’ll find out, it doesn’t matter anyway). The action, such as it is, takes place in their respective backyards, which have been combined into a common playing space even though the two couples live down the road from one another.

The Realistic Joneses is a study in anti-Aristotelian theater– what Ionesco called the “anti-play.” There’s no plot to speak of. At the play’s opening, Jennifer and Bob Jones sit in the backyard, talking about talking. John and Pony Jones enter with a bottle of white wine from “just outside Europe” that never gets consumed. The conversation goes around in circles. “You can almost hear the clouds go by,” says John. Then the Joneses #2 leave. And that’s about it. Nothing much happens over the next dozen scenes.

OK, so maybe a few things happen. We learn a little about the Joneses. Bob makes signs, Jennifer's a bookkeeper; John fixes refrigerators, Pony designs online greeting cards. There’s a hint at Jones-swapping. John meets Jenny in the supermarket, and they chat. (John: “I’m married.” Jennifer: “Who isn’t?”) Bob warms to Pony, Jennifer commiserates with John. At one point Pony finds a dead squirrel in the #1 Joneses’ backyard. At another moment, Bob suffers a seizure (offstage) and is sent to the hospital. Jenny finds out that John suffers from a serious ailment too. But none of these potential plotlines is developed; there’s no conflict, so nothing is resolved. At the end of the play we’re back where we started — two couples hanging out in a backyard.

Or are we?

Unconnected thoughts

“Be careful; be very careful,” warns Grandma in The American Dream, one of Albee’s first one-act plays. “What I told you may not be true.” That applies to Eno’s world as well. What is the point of all the ambiguity? What’s Eno trying to say? The answer lies, I think, in his use — or nonuse — of language.

In The Realistic Joneses, conversations start and go nowhere. Characters make assertions, and then retract them. Thoughts jump from one to another with no clear connection (call it “free disassociation”). Sentences seem to swallow themselves. “A lot of words are made up,” Bob says. “I wish there were less words in the English language,” says John. What’s the point of talking, anyway? After all, “I don’t really have an attention span,” says Pony.

All this meaningless talk becomes pure entertainment in the mouths of an all-star quartet. Tracy Letts (author of August: Osage County and Tony Award-winner for his recent performance as George in Virginia Woolf) plays Bob with a quiet desperation. Toni Collette (Enough Said, About a Boy, The Hours) plays Jennifer with the rueful wisdom of one who sees what’s going on (or what’s not going on). Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny, The Wrestler, The Ides of March) endows Pony with an affecting feyness, and Michael C. Hall (of TV’s Six Feet Under and Dexter) gives John an aching wistfulness.

“I thought maybe we could talk,” goes the leitmotif throughout the play. But the characters never do, not really. Eno is writing about loneliness and failure of communication. On the other hand, as Pony says: “People do get saved by people, you know.” Maybe just sitting around, listening to each other saying nothing, is as good as it gets. Since there’s really not much to say anyway, then “Life’s the best” (Bob’s last line) will suffice.