Cat Rahm and Todd Andrew Ball (Photo by Miguel Elliot)
Reviewed by Steven Leigh Morris
Torrance Theatre Company
Through June 22.
Terrence McNally’s It’s Only a Play premiered off-off-Broadway in 1982. The show was revised after its ostensibly Broadway-bound predecessor, Broadway, Broadway, closed out of town in Philadelphia to terrible reviews in 1978, thus prompting the cancellation of its slated Broadway debut that same year. McNalley’s It’s Only a Play fared better, however, transferring to off-Broadway in 1986 and, finally, to Broadway in 2014.
It must be this latter Broadway version which Torrance Theatre Company is staging, since its climactic revelation among a group of New York thespians and hangers-on concerns partygoers at a producer’s townhouse awaiting the New York Times review of a new play on Broadway, The Golden Egg. The Times critic on whom the production’s future depends is Ben Brantley (an off-stage presence), which means the play could be set at any point between 1996 (when Brantley started writing for the Times) and 2020 (when he retired). There are so few new plays performed on Broadway of late, one can presume, for authenticity’s sake, that the setting is in the waning years of the prior century, or the budding years of this one. Michael Mullen’s costumes are so gleefully flamboyant, they’re almost timeless.
McNally takes some targeted shots at New York’s love affair with British imports that arrive here to the detriment of American playwrights. The Golden Egg was penned by playwright Peter Austin (Bradley James Holzer), who turns out to be the most empathetic and grown-up character in the It’s Only a Play. I wonder why.
McNally’s comedy traffics in New York-centric tropes of egomaniacal actors, such as the haughty James Wicker, sometimes called “Wacker” (Todd Andrew Ball, delightfully neurotic beneath a veneer of self-satisfaction) who’s spent the last decade in L.A. on a now-expiring TV sitcom; and Virginia Noyes (Kate Patel, a marvelous, world-weary yet starry-eyed and indignant performance), a drug-abusing diva who got kicked out of Hollywood for bad behavior.
The vainglorious director comes in the form of Frank Finger (Theodore Coonradt), a Brit who has never received a negative review in New York, though he knows his direction sucks, and he’d dearly appreciate a public throttling for the professional fraud he knows he’s perpetrating. There’s a psychological reason why he yearns for such abuse, but that’s not worth dwelling on.
Among the hangers-on is a reviled, veteran and minor drama critic named Irene Drew (a strikingly understated and authentic performance by Cat Rahm) who is, of course, a frustrated playwright, peddling her own work under a pseudonym. The logic in McNally’s farce is so capricious that she comes pretty close to landing a production, on the spot. McNalley has no love for critics, or for drama criticism, treating them, and it, as enemies of the people.
Despite Cate Caplin’s game treatment of this capable ensemble (which also includes Ronan Meade as a newbie yokel; and a particularly empathetic portrayal by Jennifer Faneuff as The Golden Egg’s generous and well-meaning producer), It’s Only a Play has not aged well. McNally’s comedy satirizes an idiosyncratically local theater world of yore. It lives in an era when new plays were actually performed on Broadway and when critics held a ruthless power over theater-makers. The viciousness of critics that McNalley lampoons is characteristic of a bygone era, and the power of critics to make or break a show may still may be true for writers in the New York Times, but hardly so in other newspapers across the U.S, where local productions seldom get even an editorial glance, presuming there’s even a newspaper left in town.
Though the behaviors of the thespians that McNalley parodies are probably ageless, one can see a kind of provincial rust forming on the chasse of this comedy.
Torrance Theatre Company., 1316 Cabrillo Ave. Torrance; Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm; Sat.-Sun., 2 pm; thru June 22. For tickets, email Gia Jordahl at GJordahl@TorranceCA.Gov. Two hours and 20 minutes, including intermission.
