Theatre in Review: Dancing on Nails (Theatre 80)A pair of improbable, and interlocking, dreams lies at the heart of Dancing on Nails. One: Sam Heisler, the 50-ish proprietor of a Greenwich Village hardware store, falls in love, for the first time in his life, with his bookkeeper's assistant, a black girl of 20. Two: Rose, Sam's bookkeeper (also his cousin and tenant), is desperate to adopt a child but is informed by the adoption agency that, in order to qualify, she and her husband, Joe, must have $15,000 in their savings account. It's an astronomical sum for 1953, and Rose and Joe don't have anywhere near that amount -- but Sam does. Dancing on Nails follows Sam's late-in-life stab at romance with pretty, placid Natalie, a college student who lives with her grandmother and dreams of singing at the Metropolitan Opera. Meanwhile, Rose, egged on by Joe, a loudmouth and professional loser who drives a cab and dreams of playing clarinet with Benny Goodman, hatches a plan to obtain a $15,000 gift from Sam. Of course, Rose and Sam are unaware of each other's plans; one night at dinner everyone's secrets come tumbling out, with highly disruptive results. There's a pleasingly old-fashioned drama in there -- at times it recalls Paddy Chayefsky 's Middle of the Night -- but Paul Manuel Kane's script suffers from grave structural flaws. Constructed as a parade of brief scenes, many of which end abruptly and anticlimactically, it often feels like a vintage television script from which all the commercial breaks have been removed. So many scenes breed many, many scene changes; one spends as much time sitting in the dark as one does watching the play unfold. When the lights are up, one quickly notices that the characters lack nuance and substance. It is never clear why Sam, a lifelong bachelor who lives only for his business, would suddenly fall so hard and fast for the inappropriate Natalie. (There is a suggestion that Sam's loner character was shaped by his father, a real looker and a ladies' man, but this point is dropped as soon as it is raised.) It's equally hard to accept that the practical, hardheaded Rose really believes the adoption agency will award a child to a financially strapped couple living in the basement of a relative's house. There are other infelicities: Each character is given a monologue, planted awkwardly into the narrative, containing exposition that the playwright can't get into the story in a more natural fashion. Also, Dancing on Nails, which is billed as a comedy, isn't really funny, especially the stale wisecracks about the Village's gay denizens. Equally unamusing is Luba, an interfering old neighbor lady who exists largely so she can deliver the play's chief metaphor, which is derived from the title. It's possible that, played by an actor with a warmer, more outsized presence, Sam might be a more compelling character, but Peter Van Wagner gives a fussy-old-man performance that never gets past his dialogue's oy-vey clichés. (It doesn't help that he seems a good 15 years past the age of 50, lending a creepy edge to his feelings for Natalie.) Within the narrow confines of her role, Jazmyn Richardson makes an appealing figure out of Natalie, especially when, to her growing discomfort, she begins to understand the true nature of Sam's attentions. Lori Wilner is briskly efficient as Rose, making the most of a strongly written scene in which Rose takes action to get rid of Natalie. There's really nothing Michael Lewis can do with the role of Joe. (Any adoption agency that would remand a child to his care would be guilty of dereliction of duty in the highest degree.) Lauren Klein, like Wilner a Broadway veteran, executes her slim duties as Luba like the pro she is. The production was clearly hampered by a small budget and a theatre lacking in any technical amenities. Let's just say that Vicki R. Davis (set design), Gail Cooper-Hecht (costumes), and Michael Gottlieb (lighting) are capable of much more than they offer here, for reasons that I strongly suspect are beyond their control. A play like Dancing on Nails depends entirely on how much we care about the characters and their problems. We don't have to like them, necessarily, but we have to be interested in learning what happens to them. This story should be a heartbreaker, but one is too busy noticing the visible seams in Kane's construction to become engaged. It's a tale of multiple losses that left me thoroughly dry-eyed.--David Barbour 
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