Theatre in Review: Wild Animals You Should Know (MCC Theatre/Lucille Lortel Theatre) Kids today. Wild Animals You Should Know begins with Matthew and Jacob - best friends and high school juniors - in their respective bedrooms, communicating via Skype. You can tell they have the camera option, because, in a demonstration of straight-gay solidarity that I certainly don't remember from my high school days, Matthew is stripping for Jacob. (Just to keep score, Jacob is gay and Matthew is straight - or, anyway, so he says.) In the middle of this wholesome interlude, Matthew gazes out his bedroom window into the house across the street, and sees Rodney, the local scoutmaster, (a) checking him out and (b) locking lips with a male friend. We will skip over the oddity of Matthew, on the second floor, apparently looking into his neighbor's dining room, which is generally found on the ground level. Instead, we will focus on the fact that Thomas Higgins' play is set in what is surely the gayest Boy Scout troop ever. And not a happy one, either -- the central action of Wild Animals follows the efforts of Matthew -- think Eddie Haskell crossed with either Leopold or Loeb -- as he plots to expose and destroy Rodney, in order to "feel something." At least, I think that's what the play is about, because it keeps wandering off on various tangents, including the fraying marriage of Matthew's parents, Marsha and Walter, and Walter's reluctant agreement to accompany Matthew's troop on an overnight camping trip. For Walter, this is an opportunity to take part in some dubious male bonding - read: beer-drinking - with Larry, a boozy, hairy lout whose wife has finally lost patience with him and his crude ways. Lost in the shuffle is Rodney, who doesn't get a real scene until the halfway point - at which point we learn that he is a former attorney who became a scoutmaster as a tribute to his late lover, who was apparently tormented but loved the outdoors. By this point, Matthew is all but bending over to get Rodney's attention, leaving the poor guy so flustered that he takes drastic action to regain his peace of mind. There's a good idea hiding somewhere in Higgins' play - a kind of panorama of troubled manhood on both sides of the generational divide - but it is far too rickety to support much of anything. (In truth, it bears an eerie resemblance to Robert Aguirre-Sacasa's Good Men and True, which also featured a sexually conflicted sociopathic golden boy, his masochistic gay best friend, and a parent who slowly becomes aware that the family home contains a bad seed.) There are simply too many questions hanging over the narrative. There's no context for Matthew's destructive behavior -- I guess internalized homophobia is the cause -- and it's never really believable that he would befriend Jacob, a total social outcast, even to keep him around as an acolyte. For that matter, it's never clear what Jacob, who is more or less out of the closet, sees in the notoriously homophobic Boy Scouts. And would Rodney really throw over a lucrative career to volunteer for an organization that despises gay men? Who's paying the rent out there in suburbia? By the way, as a scoutmaster, Rodney isn't such a paragon; he vanishes for much of the trip, looking soulfully at the scenery while Matthew runs amok and Larry and Walter drink themselves into oblivion. On the plus side, Higgins has a fine ear for the way young people talk, and Trip Cullman, the director, keeps the action moving at a crisp pace. But when actors like Patrick Breen, as Walter, and Alice Ripley, as Marsha, look totally stranded, something is wrong. (Their scenes together, especially when they are planning to conceal from Matthew the fact that Walter has lost his job, have some of the play's most wooden dialogue; Ripley looks like she'd rather be back in Next to Normal, having psychotic delusions eight times a week.) Jay Armstrong Johnson manages a nice mix of menace and wounded pride as Matthew, but he's stuck with the character's motiveless malignity. Gideon Glick's Jacob is a kind of ultra-nerd - with his high-pitched voice and awkward gestures, he seems to be on the near side of puberty -- which makes it even more awkward when he is given lengthy explanatory speeches about Matthew's character. John Behlmann's Rodney is as properly attractive and Daniel Stewart Sherman's Larry as appalling as anyone might wish, but both are pasteboard characters, not complex enough for one of the thinner sitcoms. It's not an easy task to design scenery for a play that moves from suburban living and bedrooms to the wilderness, but Andromache Chalfant's solution - one drop depicting a housing development, another showing a forest, both frequently covered by diaphanous curtains - is remarkable mostly for its lack of detail. (One wonders if MCC isn't saving its pennies for that Carrie revival that opens early next year.) David Weiner's lighting and Jenny Mannis' costumes are both totally solid, and Fitz Patton provides a number of evocative sound effects, including birdsong, rock music, and those funny noises Skype makes. It's not clear to me that MCC has done Higgins a favor by producing Wild Animals You Should Know. Not that young writers should be stuck in development forever, but this appears to be his first major production in New York, and, given the reviews, it can't be the debut of his dreams. Here's hoping that this experience proves to be a learning experience in the right way.--David Barbour 
|
