Theatre in Review: Skintight (Roundabout Theatre Company)

	Eli Gelb, Idina Menzel. Photo: Joan Marcus

The revelations one sometimes has at the theatre: Watching Skintight, I was suddenly grateful never to have had the opportunity to sit on the couch with my mother, running through the available men on Grindr. In the words of one Joe Orton character, "It's a Freudian nightmare!" And this is only one of many mortifying situations that make up Joshua Harmon's latest caustic assessment of the way we live now.

And, as usual, Harmon has some mordant -- and very funny -- points to make. The mother is Jodi Isaac, a successful Los Angeles lawyer who has come to New York in order to flee the appalling fact that her fiftyish ex-husband is about to marry a twenty-four-year-old exercise instructor. (Jodi, unable to recall if the young lady's name is Misty or Madison or whatever, frequently settles for calling her "the little spinner.") She has retreated to the home of her father, Elliot, ostensibly to celebrate his seventieth birthday, but all sorts of dismaying discoveries await her there.

The principal shocker is Trey, Elliott's very buff twenty-year-old boyfriend. Elliot, a fashion designer/merchandiser, bears more than a passing resemblance to Calvin Klein and his late-blooming homosexuality is old news. Jodi is used to the passing parade of his boyfriends, but Trey is different. For one thing, he is in residence at Elliot's home. For another, the two men refer to each other as partners. And there's the little matter of the $500,000 Rolex on Trey's wrist, a gift from Elliot. Having turned to her family in a moment of crisis, Jodi suddenly finds herself displaced and she doesn't conceal her displeasure. Learning that Trey doesn't know Elliot's age, she says, needling both men, "Daddy was born October 4th, 1944, just as World War II was really getting crazy!"

Needing reinforcements in her battle to unseat the interloper, Trey, Jodi enlists her son, Benjamin, who is currently studying queer theory in Hungary. (When someone suggests that this is a pretty exotic combination, he adds, "It's actually not. There's actually like nine other homos in my program.") This leads to the moment referenced above, with Jodi, Benjamin, and the Grindr page; just when you think the scene couldn't get any more awkward, they are joined by Trey, wearing nothing but a jockstrap. Later, after Jodi has retreated, things get a little flirty between the two young men, a fact observed by Elliot, who is ready to eject his so-called loved ones to protect his hold over Trey.

Harmon has plenty of things to say about our superficial culture, with its emphasis on youth and beauty -- not yet able to legally consume liquor, Trey is already a fan of preventative Botox -- but, most of the time, Skintight rarely pierces the epidermal level, harvesting plenty of laughs from its dizzily self-absorbed cast of characters while leaving alone some of the plot's queasier implications. The main event is the replacement of one fetishized youth figure with another: Jodi, who has aged out of her marriage, was, at an alarmingly early age, her father's steady companion, so much so that she was "the Eloise of Studio 54." It's no surprise that she is deeply threatened by the presence of Trey, a combination son and lover. (Elliot often acts more like a parent, warning him to be a good boy and fussing over the young man's shirtsleeves; then again, running his fingers along Trey's arm, he says, "I'd like to have sheets made from your skin.") Along the way, the fears of a middle-aged woman facing rejection on all fronts is obscured by an amusing family freak-out, loaded with outre details and acid observations.

The big news of Daniel Aukin's production is that Idina Menzel, as Jodi, is just as at home in boulevard comedy as she is in musical theatre. Jodi has one of the rants that turn up in every Harmon play, in this case about her shattered marriage -- fuming about her ex and his sweet young thing, she says, "What do they even talk about? I want to see the transcripts!" -- and the actress does full justice to it. Posing as a stern mother, she calls Benjamin on the carpet, telling him in no uncertain terms, "You can't f--k your grandfather's boyfriend, is that clear?" -- making such an outrageous statement seem like the height of sanity. Her reactions are priceless; she has a hundred different ways of registering Jodi's irritation at the Trey regime, and when she discovers a porn website featuring the young man, the smile she delivers is equally beatific and glittering with malice. If she stops short of exploring what must be some devastating emotions behind Jodi's gag lines, it's because the play doesn't let her go any further.

As Trey, Will Brittain certainly has the looks -- how many actors would play an entire scene in only a jockstrap? -- as well as the diamond-in-the-rough attitude that charms and grates in equal measure, but he also persuasively hints at the character's troubled background. Eli Gelb's Benjamin is a classically entitled Harmon youth -- asked about his trip, he can only reply, sullenly, "Mom put me in coach" -- but he warms up as the play goes along, finding himself outmatched when alone with Trey, but also offering up intriguing bits of family history and holding forth on the reputation of Elliot, who worked himself up from a working-class Jewish family, as "the Horatio Alger of Brooklyn." (He adds, of course, that Alger was a notorious pedophile.) Cynthia Mace amuses as a deadpan household servant, earning one of the evening's biggest laughs with her Sisyphean effort at getting Benjamin's enormous luggage up the stairs.

As the controlling, withholding Elliot, whose idea of a conversation involves recounting, without interruption, his past successes, Jack Wetherall gets the meatiest material and he runs with it, especially in a speech explaining his philosophy of relationships as "just two people exchanging goods." He also makes something disconcertingly powerful out of Elliot's climactic aria describing his fascination with Trey's body, adding, "After about thirty-five, you wake up and you really start to smell the stench of death on a person. By sixty, it's almost insufferable." Suddenly, a risque domestic comedy acquires an autumnal glow of melancholy.

Aukin's direction is generally capable, although at times he doesn't seem to know what to do with Trey, who is often left to lean against an upstage wall like a hustler looking for a trick. He also can't solve the problem of the last twenty minutes or so, in which Harmon seems to be searching for some kind of plausible ending. Still, he makes a telling thing out of a look through a family photo album, a moment, filled with unspoken feelings, that triggers an event that can confidently be called Jodi's worst nightmare. Lauren Helpern's immaculate, almost sterile, Greenwich Village townhouse setting, with its daunting staircase and sliding walls, is fairly ideal, although Pat Collins' flattish lighting deprives it of that extra touch of glamour. Jess Goldstein's costumes, ranging from Elliot and Trey's Klein-ish outfits to Benjamin's ragbag of colors and patterns to Jodi's carefully cultivated style, are acutely observed. Eric Shimelonis has provided solid reinforcement for his own jazzy between-scenes musical compositions.

And Aukin and company, working with welcome understatement, convince us, in the finale, that Elliot's family will reconfigure itself along new lines, everyone moving forward together, if only because they have no other choice. There are some very uncomfortable thoughts lurking under the surface of Skintight, about family life in a society in which everyone is on the make, until halted by senescence or the grave, and sexuality is a form of currency. But, for once, Harmon is content not to probe them. If Skintight is ultimately just for laughs, at least there are plenty of them. -- David Barbour