Theatre in Review: Everything's Fine (DR2 Theatre)Douglas McGrath's solo show is in the tradition, stretching back at least to James Thurber, of warm, homey memoirs about growing up in a heartland America marked by eccentricity and mild grotesqueries. The operating words here are "homey" and "mild." Despite certain charms, Everything's Fine may a little too amiable for its own good and too diffuse to have much impact. It's rather like having someone reading a "Personal History" feature -- a rather lengthy one -- from a back issue of The New Yorker. If this notion appeals, as it clearly did to a significant portion of the audience at the performance I attended, this arguably overcivilized evening will be catnip to you. But there are many more exciting entertainments in New York right now. The focus of McGrath's memoir of Midland, Texas in the late 1960s is the weird affair of the mind that blossoms between him, age 13, and Mrs. Malenkov, his 47-year-old history teacher. To be sure, it is a one-sided passion, bordering on mania. It begins when, one day, she keeps him after class for a brief conversation, which, he admits, leaves him feeling "temporarily sophisticated and adult." But she follows up with a series of inappropriately personal notes, written on blue paper, and soon he is keeping company with her daily when he would much rather be running around on his bike and eating at Texas Burger with his friends. To be clear, this misalliance never tips over into sexual abuse, but there is nevertheless something wildly off about Mrs. Malenkov's emotional reliance on the baffled McGrath. When he tries to extricate himself, she makes distraught phone calls that disrupt his family's dinner hour; in one of the funnier passages, she stuffs his locker with "bitter, guilt-inducing proverbs," like "Go often to the house of your friend, lest the path choke with weeds," and "It's hard to see the rainbow since you tore the colors out." Her chef-d'œuvre in this genre is a poem titled "Death of a Flower." Going further, she executes an astonishing deception by way of trying to trick him into a declaration of affection. Some of this is amusing, especially when McGrath is channeling the unflappable, desert-dry drawl of his best friend, Eddie. (Asked by a frantic McGrath for advice about handling Mrs. Malenkov, Eddie replies, "I don't know. What'd you do with the other teachers you broke up with?") But, as the piece progresses, it's hard to shake the feeling that a desperately strange and sad situation is being played for conventional, superficial laughs. (Oddly, Mrs. Malenkov's husband, mentioned in passing, never figures in the story; is he entirely oblivious to his wife's peculiar attachments? Has this never happened before?) Late in his telling, McGrath tries to supply some sympathy for this clearly disturbed woman, subsequently linking her fate to the tragedies that would soon befall his family. But the latter have been left too much in the background to matter, and, despite some touching passages near the end, Everything's Fine ends up feeling like a rambling collection of anecdotes, characterized by a light-minded treatment that sometimes feel false. McGrath, who has the chummy, slightly detached, air of a prep school's most popular headmaster, is an ingratiating presence, although he isn't entirely at home in the solo show format; there's a sometimes-recited quality to his delivery and he occasionally stumbles over his words. To be sure, he has a writer's eye for the outré detail, especially in a story about his father, who lost an eye as a boy, visiting a doctor who opens a drawerful of glass eyeballs waiting to be custom-painted. He drops names with élan, recounting his mother's youthful friendship with Andy Warhol. And he has fun with the decorative excesses of the late Sixties, for example a classroom decked out with posters featuring quotes from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, "which was perplexingly popular at the time," or bromides like "Today is the first day of the rest of your life," which, he adds, is "inarguable and not worth saying." But these side excursions into humor don't entirely distract from the show's structural frailties. Director John Lithgow hasn't been able to impose a surer pace on the proceedings, but he has put together a solid design package that includes John Lee Beatty's classroom set, Linda Cho's well-styled costume, Caitlin Smith Rapoport's attractive and surprisingly varied lighting; and Emma Wilk's sound, which injects the action with Doris Day's "Teacher's Pet," Rosemary Clooney's "Come On-A My House," and Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces," as well as bits of "Pomp and Circumstance" and George Gershwin's "Walkin' the Dog." It's a rambling evening, its incidental pleasures mixed with longueur, falling short of the emotional impact that McGrath seemingly aims for. "Our hearts! What they put us through," he notes near the end. Yes, indeed, but this piece doesn't really put us through much at all. --David Barbour 
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