Theater Review: Susan Sarandon in Jesse Eisenberg's lukewarm Happy Talk

Happy Talk

Written by Jesse Eisenberg

Directed by Scott Elliott

Starring Susan Sarandon

The New Group

Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan

May 19, 2019

The Manhattan off-Broadway theater company The New Group is a little hard to peg. They alternate between interesting, edgy new plays by unknown playwrights and star-studded plays written by famous actors, e.g. Hamish Linklater’s The Whirligig and Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House. The latter category of productions sometimes seem to me as a type of vanity exercise—an actor writes an adequate play, then gets his famous colleagues to come by and act in it, presumably at a discounted cost to the company, while selling out the house. Happy Talk by 35 year old actor Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) is another such example.  Eisenberg has written plays before. He usually acts in them as well, but did not here, focusing our attention on the 72 year old Susan Sarandon (Thelma and Louise, Dead Man Walking), who revels in this retro-styled star vehicle for an  scene chewing diva.

Happy Talk is an old-style starlet play derived from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, to which it hews a bit too closely. Sarandon plays Lorraine, a manipulative, frustrated, aging actress now starring in local Jewish theater productions (currently Bloody Mary in South Pacific), always imagining her impact on the audience and the world as greater than it is. She displays the full range of diva gestures and narcissistic rages to her family, which consists of a nearly silent, intellectual husband with a neurologic disorder, and a distanced, angry daughter who sets the play’s events off with a surprise visit that stirs the dysfunctional, yet stable family pot. The play is more interesting after the daughter arrives; before that it is mostly a catalog of opportunities for Ms. Sarandon to channel and display her inner Joan Crawford—this she does, if not always with much subtlety or nuance. The target of most of Lorraine’s manipulation, and the dramatic plot crux of the play, is the Serbian immigrant live-in maid Ljuba who is saving up to bring her family to the USA. The play is timely in that it highlights the vulnerability of such immigrants to financial and other manipulation by their employers. However, Marin Ireland’s performance as the maid lacked the nuance and depth that would have made her a truly sympathetic character.  I liked how Mr. Eisenberg did not show his tragic cards and the depths of Lorraine’s psychopathy too early—Lorraine comes across early in the play as just a delusional, flighty, somewhat pathetic aging artiste. Later in the play she evolves into something quite different, and quite menacing. Scary narcissists are all the rage these days, I fear. Sarandon performs this transition well, but is limited by playwright Eisenberg’s restricted range of dialogue and ability to build and release tension.

Eisenberg’s attention to black comedic detail is good, and better than his overall play construction. Similar to 1930’s films, Lorraine is given a nice range of one liners. For example, commenting on her mute husband’s obsession with Civil War historical trivia, she says…”all old men get fixated on that war at one time or another before they die…it’s men’s ticket to the River Styx.” While in the best of those old films the humor makes us cringe when the horror behind the mask emerges, that was less successful here. Mr. Eisenberg and Ms. Sarandon did not quite achieve the linear increments of discomfort and horror that the best of these works do—the ending came too much as a surprise. Also updating 1930’s style, there was an appearance by a bitchy, witty gay friend similar to many such characters in old movies—only here the gayness was explicit (and delivered by an Asian actor), not just coded. All in all, I did not see much in Happy Talk to suggest that Mr. Eisenberg has what it takes to be anything more than a literately entertaining playwright, a sort of updated, cynical Noël Coward. In that sense, a revival of the 1930’s spirit of diva-driven entertainment is not such a bad thing, as long as the production of such efforts do not prevent the emergence of more talented playwrights with more to say.