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| Hamish Linklater |
The New Group in midtown Manhattan is known for its
sponsorship of new plays. This year these included plays by two well-known
actors: Wallace Shawn’s
Evening at the
Talk House reviewed here, and Hamish Linklater’s
The Whirligig, which I saw in early May. Linklater (b. 1976) is
most known for costarring roles on TV’s
The
Newsroom and
The New Adventures of
Old Christine, and in the Jackie Robinson biopic
42. His two prior plays (
The Vandal,
The Cheats) were considered promising if a bit long.
The Whirligig
was a two hour+, ambitious effort to show the messy, complex, entwining lives
around a dying teenager (a whirligig is a spinning top, or state of disorder). While
it ultimately did not quite hold together, I admired its ambitious structure
and approach to narrative.
Even before the play opens we meet the sick teenaged Julie,
in a hospital bed slowly revolving on the stage, asleep with IV’s attached to
her. We quickly learn she is dying of hepatitis C due to IV drug use. The play
slowly introduces her parents, lovers, and friends, each of whom had some role
to play in the tragedy. The most notable faces in the cast of eight are Zosia
Mamet (Shoshanna on
Girls) and Tony
winner Norbert Leo Butz. They achieve a tight ensemble performance, with no one
character standing out. This well matches the playwright’s intent of drawing a character-web
around the dying Julie, with the characters’ interrelationships initially
unclear, then crystallizing by the end of the play. I liked the playwright’s
confusion of the characters’ ethics and intentions—no one was quite who they
initially seemed to be. The dialogue was informal, witty, and realistic, but
without attempts at reflection or truly deep dives into any one of the
characters, however. They play gave a
mostly surface view of each one without attempts at psychoanalysis. This would
be OK, except each character was so distinctive and clearly written that I
wanted more, and deeper dives into each. A two hour play generally has segments
in which these deeper dives are taken (e.g. soliloquies in Shakespeare, O’Neill,
Miller), and Linklater might have improved this play with judicious cuts of
some superficial dialogue and a few soliloquies. I think deeper characterization
would have created a more poetic elevation of the tragedy.
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| Zosia Mamet |
The most unusual and daring thing about
The Whirligig was its risky tone of tragicomedy. This is still
among the rarest of US forms (more common in Europe), as it is thought to make
American audiences uncomfortable (don’t mix the emotions!). The intent of the
playwright comes in a line (quote?) by one of the characters that tragedy
focuses on death, while comedy focuses on love. The ultimate payoff of
The Whirligig is the demonstration of
all the characters’ love for the dying Julie, and for each other, but the road
to get there is long and tortuous. The comedic interjections are variably funny
(lots of social media humor), and sometimes even includes Shakespearean slapstick,
as when a tree branch collapses onto stage with two guilt-ridden lovers aboard.
There is even a Shakespearean fool present, an alcoholic ex-professor who
somehow appears in key scenes like the fool in
King Lear, mixing his ludicrous-prophetic-cutting remarks into the
tragic circumstances. A number of great playwrights have used comedy to enhance
tragedy (Shakespeare, Williams, O’Neill), and Linklater is on the right track
here. His mixing of styles and elements is very ambitious, challenging, and
entertaining--and comes very close to working as a unified whole. Ultimately,
the play did not quite make me care enough about the characters so that the
complex mix would add up to a work of profound tragedy (see Eugene O’Neill). Linklater
is still very early in his playwrighting career, and has a good ear for modern
speech and eye for modern cultural absurdities. He takes risks, and engages the
audience’s mind and heart. I look forward to seeing if he can harness his
multiple great ideas into a more unified, probing work next time.
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