Theatre in Review: The Whoopi Monologues (Lincoln Center Theater/Mitzi E. Newhouse)

	Kecia Lewis. Photo: Angela Marie Orellana

Something is happening at Lincoln Center Theater, and I'm not sure what to make of it; a company that for years matched provocative new plays with canny, carefully chosen revivals is suddenly playing it awfully safe. Indeed, under the leadership of new artistic director Lear deBessonet, the company finds itself hurtling into the past. This isn't necessarily bad: Its current revival of Ragtime couldn't be more relevant to our fraught political moment, but looking ahead, one is surprised to see a season featuring the decades-old courtroom drama A Few Good Men and The Sound of Music. Time may prove us wrong, but, at the moment, such choices look positively timid.

Then there's The Whoopi Monologues: Few people remember that before her many films and her long run on the morning talk show The View, Whoopi Goldberg got her start as a performance artist in the Lily Tomlin mold. Most of the material onstage at the Newhouse is taken from Goldberg's 1983 Broadway solo show, and its age is apparent. Punchlines are built around Shelley Winters, The Love Boat, the famous "Come Back to Jamaica" TV ad campaign, All My Children, and Frederick's of Hollywood. Does anyone under forty recognize these? Many of the bits feel culled from comedy club engagements of another era. Listening to Kara Young as Fontaine, a philosophical junkie, crack jokes about "stewardesses" and unreliable airline toilets or seeing Kecia Lewis, as the menopausal Lurleen, demonstrate how to insert an old-fashioned sanitary napkin, one suspects an equally good title would be The Joan Rivers Monologues.

As was noticed back in the 1980s, Goldberg's pieces often strip their gears when switching from audience-baiting gags to unearned solemnities. For example, there's Fontaine, who, despite his drug habit, has a Ph.D, kvetches all the way to Amsterdam, where he has a contrived epiphany about the Holocaust. It doesn't help that the character, a strung-out academic with a street vocabulary and a surprising naivete regarding Anne Frank's history, is entirely synthetic. Equally assembled from a smorgasbord of conflicting ideas is Surfer Girl, a California teen with a Valley Girl accent, a Catholic background, and an unwanted pregnancy. Her piece relies heavily on a single tiresome joke ("Like I'm totally PG." "Are you in a movie?") before turning into a pro-abortion sermon in its final moments.

The Times critic Frank Rich noted in 1983 that Goldberg outshone her material and so it is here; the main reason to see The Whoopi Monologues is to catch five actresses demonstrating their easy mastery of the stage. Young, who barely seems to get a day off anymore, does remarkably well as Fontaine, at one point curling up on the floor to demonstrate the desolate appearance of the green beans in his in-flight meat. (The effect is equally bizarre and hilarious.) Kerry Washington finds the offhand laughs embedded in Surfer Girl's airheaded reasoning. ("I'm a surfer because before there was the mall, there was the ocean, okay.") I don't envy Lewis her turn as Lurleen, a statuesque matron fretting about age, especially when she has to deliver a tune titled "Balding Pudenda," but she is a commanding presence throughout. Having an almost indecently good time (and winning over the audience without a fight) is Danielle Pinnock as Jamaican Lady, a souvenir vendor, who, taken up by a wealthy elderly American tourist nicknamed "old raisin," gleefully learns how much the wages of sin can buy. At the performance I attended, Dominique Fishback was out, but her understudy, Kai Heath, was solid in the most derivative piece as Blonde Girl, whose plans to escape Blackness include a visit to the optometrist ("he got blue eyes in his desk drawer") and a thorough dunking in Clorox.

Whitney White's direction doesn't try to paper over the material's many crevices; instead, she creates a festive atmosphere, relying on her cast members' skills, not least their knack for working a room. (If you sit down in front, expect to be quizzed, high-fived, or flirted with.) The design team gives the production a considerable theatrical boost, beginning with the set by Studio Bent, which includes Austrian curtains, a curved proscenium lined in lightbulbs, and an upstage wall with five fully furnished dressing rooms built in. The wall and stage floor are surfaces for Hana S. Kim's projections, which range from ocean waves to a famous Anne Frank quote. Qween Jean's costumes include a brilliantly stylized ensemble for Lewis and a full set of flowing disco-era dresses for everyone else. Completing each look are Nikiya Mathis' creative wig and hair designs. Cha See's lighting is carefully attuned to the piece's mood swings; wait for the cue that signals Fontaine's entrance into the Frank family's secret annex. Fan Zhang provides both appropriate original music and some tasty pop selections, including "The Hustle."

There's nothing wrong with a genuine crowd-pleaser like The Whoopi Monologues, even if the humor is, to my mind, too gynecological and shtick-based. It is summertime, after all, and deBessonet probably made a smart commercial choice in going after the middle-aged women who tune into The View. And with the Claire Tow Theater upstairs, Lincoln Center Theater has hardly abandoned its commitment to new writing. But it's a little concerning to see this lightly pandering evening of laughs and tears presented in the same space that, only recently, hosted the climate-change drama Kyoto, Ibsen's Ghosts, the riveting Rupert Murdoch docudrama Corruption, and Candrice Jones' tender, funny, and observant Flex. I'm not worried yet. But it's a situation that bears watching. --David Barbour