Theatre in Review: The Submission (MCC Theatre/Lucille Lortel Theatre)

	Jonathan Groff. Photo: Joan Marcus.

Jeff Talbott does himself no favors in the first 15 minutes or so of The Submission; it's rare that a play can get past such a weak premise to become something really interesting. As it happens, however, the author has more than a few lame plot devices up his sleeve; among other things, he's got a knack for dialogue that crackles and a take-no-prisoners approach to liberal pieties. The Submission is occasionally hard to believe; it is never, ever boring.

But first, there's that bad-news setup: Danny is a young, frustrated playwright; a couple of years out of Yale, he has little more than a few readings to his credit, and a sense of panic is setting in. How desperate is he? Having penned what is, by all accounts, an extremely acute drama of ghetto life, he sends it to the Humana Festival, where it is accepted. The catch: Danny, who is white, has submitted it under the name Shaleeha G'ntamobi. To carry off the deception, he hires Emilie, a black actress, to act as his front. The plan is to reveal the truth after the play opens, to presumed acclaim, in Louisville.

It's startling to see a modern playwright enthusiastically employing the kind of dumb deception with which Broadway writers like Norman Krasna peppered their weaker comedies in the '50s and '60s. Never mind that Danny's plan is a recipe for career suicide, or that the staff of an eminent resident theatre might not enjoy being made fools of; it's totally unbelievable that Danny would get anyone else, let alone the intelligent and witty Emilie, to be his partner in crime.

But even during this wobbly opening stretch, Talbott provides plenty of amusement, much of having to do with the insular nature of life in the theatre. "So you want to pull some Freaky Friday shit with me?" asks Emilie, summing things up with rare acumen. Jaded theatre insiders will relish the way Trevor, Danny's best friend, lethally describes the theatre's dramaturg: "British accent: born in Topeka." And when all else fails, there's Pete, Danny's partner, who stuns the others with his naïveté. Hearing about the Humana Festival, he asks, "Is that a big deal?", leaving the others aghast.

And, as the deception unfolds, Danny and Emilie take part in a remarkably uncensored discussion in which he tries to make her admit that, as a gay man, he has experienced the same kind of prejudice that she has. This idea, in Emilie's unsentimental estimation, is "like Hitler trying a piece of kugel and saying he understands the plight of the Jews" - a remark that suggests a submerged level of acrimony that no amount of we're-all-in-this-together bonhomie can paper over.

The play enters rehearsals, with Emilie on site and Danny in a nearby hotel room, trying to call the shots, and the arrangement breaks down into a struggle for authorial control, culminating in an opening-night battle royal that brings out the heavy verbal artillery, including all of the ugliest epithets typically used against blacks and gays. As both Danny and Emilie go too far, saying things that can never be unsaid, we are given a startling reminder of the rancor that still lurks behind the euphemisms and evasions that we use when we talk about racial and sexual differences.

Helping matters enormously is Walter Bobbie's confident staging, which has the snap and pace of screwball comedy, aided by an extremely adept cast. Jonathan Groff's natural charm goes a long way toward explaining how Danny can get loved ones and strangers alike to sign on to his nutty scheme. Danny keeps slipping in and out of focus- if he's really so tone deaf about race, how did he write a play that even Emilie admits is great? -- but Groff turns this indecision to his advantage, keeping us guessing. He has an ideal antagonist in Rutina Wesley's Emilie, whose cut-the-crap attitude enlivens the play's arguments to no end; she remains compelling even in the final scorched-earth encounter. Providing lively color commentary from the sidelines are Will Rogers as Trevor, who falls for Emilie, thus splitting his loyalties, and Eddie Kaye Thomas as Pete, who sees trouble coming from a mile away and yet ends up in the crossfire, anyway. ("I could have stayed with Dr. Barry Levine," he notes, wondering why he thought living with a playwright would be so exciting.)

Another plus factor is the slick, fast-moving production design. The set, by the ubiquitous David Zinn, features a series of upstage panels that spin around, taking us from a Starbucks to Danny's apartment to various Louisville hotel rooms. Thanks to Darryl Maloney's pulsating abstract projections, and the driving original music by Ryan Rumery and Christian Fredrickson, the already-swift scenic transitions seem to move even more quickly. Anita Yavich's highly observant costumes and David Weiner's typically clean, precise lighting complete the package.

The Submission gets wobbly again near the finale, with a couple of twists that don't quite make sense; also, Talbott has trouble finding a way of wrapping it all up. But this is exactly the kind of promising, provocative work that a company like MCC is supposed to showcase. In the case of The Submission, they can safely say, mission accomplished.--David Barbour