Theater Review: Good for Otto analyzes the analysts

Good for Otto

Written by David Rabe

Directed by Scott Elliott

Starring Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, F. Murray Abraham

Playwright David Rabe (b. 1940) was a hot commodity back in the 1980s, when he wrote the screenplay for the Jill Clayburgh star vehicle I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can and the Tony-winning play Sticks and Bones. His plays are more sporadic now, and his recent Good for Otto suggests that his inspiration is waning. This is a large 16-character play luxuriously cast with Oscar-winners and nominees F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus), 

and the married couple Ed Harris (The Right Stuff, Apollo 13, Pollock) and Amy Madigan (Places in the Heart, The Right Stuff).

Why these famed actors would have been attracted to this overstuffed, overlong play is unclear. Good for Otto (Otto is the hamster pet of one of the characters) is a series of vignettes showing the interaction of 8 patients in a local mental health clinic with one of two therapists (Harris and Madigan). Rabe has a good ear for dialogue and writes convincing, often funny lines for the patients with anxiety, OCD, PTSD, etc. He summons fearsome emotion when writing for a traumatized, delusional young girl (played brilliantly by Rileigh McDonald). But ultimately the play does not hang together with any unified purpose. The three-hour play is mostly enacted on a bare set with two central chairs, with the rest of the cast and some audience members (why?) surrounding them in rows of folding chairs on the stage. There are multiple encounters with the various patients, but their stories never unify into any sort of theme. I think Rabe’s intent was more to make this about the travails of the therapists. There is a stream-of-consciousness subplot as Harris’ character daydreams during his long difficult day, leading to some mildly surreal song and dance numbers involving the patients, and a recurring vision of his dead mother giving him advice. This could have been a very interesting focus to the play (rather like Equus was really about the psychiatrist), but it gets buried in the long series of disconnected short stories about all the patients. The play therefore loses focus, and I am at a loss to indicate what it really was about. I got very edgy in the last half hour, wanting it to end, and hoping for a clever resolution that never really came. I have been very impressed with Scott Elliott’s productions for The New Group when directing ensemble performances without stars, but he now seems to be producing multiple star-driven vehicles to drive new plays that perhaps should not receive such attention, e.g. Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House or Hamish Linklater’s The Whirligig. Likewise, this play featured the three stars mentioned above, was originally to have included Rosie O’Donnell, and saw the playwrights’s son Michael appear in a bit part. Sadly, Good for Otto was the worst of the lot, felt like a bit of a lifetime achievement award for Mr. Rabe bestowed by the New Group, and was not a successful comeback effort for this renowned playwright of the last century. Woody Allen says more about analysts in 30 seconds than this play does in three hours.

Having recently seen two plays with big casts but vastly different quality (this one and the outstanding The Ferryman in London), I have thought about how playwrights or novelists can justify and succeed with large casts of over 10 characters. Certainly, each character needs to have some distinctiveness to justify their place on stage. But some sort of unity or structure is needed if the play is not to become a revue, and it seems to me that this can be done in several ways, to different ends. In one model, a central figure is surrounded by multiple villains and examples of local color to show a cross section of society (David Copperfield, Annie). More complex is the mosaic type, lacking a true central character, but where multiple characters are distinctively portrayed in vignettes, then unify in some common purpose or event (e.g. Robert Altman’s movies like Nashville and The Player, A Chorus Line, disaster movies like Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure). Good for Otto fits into this category, unfortunately closer to The Poseidon Adventure than Nashville in quality. Perhaps at the highest level are plays in which multiple interesting characters gradually reveal themselves, often with a purpose that is initially vague.  Our familiarity with these characters sharpens as the reason they are together clarifies. Most important, we are left with multiple examples of a common thematic reflection on humanity, whether the instability of the family in Mourning Becomes Electra or The Ferryman, the triumph of love and lust in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the hopelessness of dreams and ambition in The Iceman Cometh. Writing such a unifying ensemble piece is every bit as demanding as creating a single compelling character like Hamlet, Amanda Wingfield, or Willy Loman, and requires attention to pacing and choreography. It is probably not a coincidence that the most successful models of this form come from the very best playwrights.