Theatre in Review: Significant Other (Roundabout Theatre Company/Laura Pels Theatre)

	Lindsay Mendez, Gideon Glick. Photo: Joan Marcus

Talk about being up-to-the-minute: Even as the Supreme Court was preparing to hand down its landmark decision about marriage equality, Roundabout opened Significant Other, a play that, in its own oddball way, is a kind of theatrical landmark. In the decades since Mart Crowley ignited the conversation about homosexuality with The Boys in the Band, we've seen gay characters struggle with the closet, unaccepting friends and family members, religious fanatics, and AIDS. Now meet Jordan Berman (played by Gideon Glick), the protagonist of Joshua Harmon's comedy, whose biggest worry is that he might make it to age 30 without being married. "I'm almost twenty-nine years old and nobody has ever told me they love me," says Jordan. "That's, like, a problem, isn't it?" It's to Harmon's credit that we perceive Jordan's dilemma as both the basis for comedy and an authentic source of anguish.

Jordan, who lives in Manhattan and works in advertising, is still best friends with the three young ladies who saw him through college. They've spent the better part of a decade sharing everything, but, as the play begins, one of them -- the riotously entitled Kiki -- is getting married. (Her monologue about how her engagement is the inevitable result of selfishness --- "But then I just stopped thinking about other people and I got to this place where it was all about me"-- is a small masterpiece of self-help satire.) Kiki's wedding is sufficiently exotic that it seems like just another group escapade -- but in the course of Significant Other, Jordan's companions will peel off one by one, opting for more settled lives. Coming of age in a world where marriage and family life are no longer off limits to gays, he is nevertheless left wondering if these things constitute, for him, an unattainable dream. In one poignant sequence, Jordan, contemplating sending an ill-advised text message to his office crush, calls each of his girlfriends in succession, hoping to indulge in one of their marathon late-night emotional autopsies -- but, for the first time, all three are otherwise engaged.

Significant Other follows Jordan as he reacts to a series of events that leave him increasingly isolated. He obsesses over Will, the handsome, and probably gay, colleague whose affable manner is totally unreadable. He trolls through social media sites, where, for example, one possible candidate lets him know he has a face that was meant to be ejaculated on. ("I don't know," Jordan frets. "I feel like my face was made for others things, actually. Or additional things.") And he visits his increasingly frail grandmother, Helene, looking at photos and sharing family stories -- but who unnerves him with her cheerful talk of suicide.

And still the weddings keep coming, leaving Jordan on the sidelines, his melancholy plight enlivened by a battery of hilariously sharp-eyed social observations. (Not for nothing does the script of Significant Other feature an epigraph taken from Wendy Wasserstein's Isn't It Romantic; Jordan has a lot in common with Wasserstein's famously ambivalent heroines.) All of these are rendered in precise and amusing detail in Trip Cullman's production: Glick's insanely detailed romantic fantasies, which surely render invalid any possible real-world relationship; a trio of wedding receptions, in which the guests mercilessly eye the happy couple on the dance floor; a mortifying first date, to see a documentary about the Franco-Prussian War.

Much of Significant Other sheathes its tender heart in such scenes of nutty, nervy comedy. (At times, it reminded me of Noah Baumbach's film Frances Ha, which also deals with the way all-consuming college friendships can act as a shield against growing up.) But Harmon also wrote that accomplished exercise in invective, Bad Jews, and, lest we dismiss Jordan as a gentle sad sack, he has a climactic rant aimed at Laura, his closest friend, beginning with the statement, "Your wedding is my funeral," and laying bare the enormous bitterness and sense of betrayal he feels at being relegated to an "occasional court jester and pitiable reminder of what happens to people who never find someone and spend their lives attending the life-events of all their friends and buying them outrageous gifts and then going home and getting into bed alone and turning on Law & Order and staring at the ceiling trying to understand how everything went to shit."

This speech is handled with remarkable intensity and power by Glick, who thoroughly nails the stormy, conflicting emotions that threaten to leave Jordan marooned on an emotional island where he is the only inhabitant. The role is a minefield -- Jordan could come across as a masochist or a stalker or a total loser -- which Glick traverses with remarkable agility and grace. The rest of the cast is happily up to his level. Sas Goldberg makes every line count as Kiki, who improbably weds a son of the South, largely because he is available. (Her phone message: "This is Kiki Cohen-O'Connolly. I hyphenated. Leave a message.") Carra Patterson underplays skillfully as Vanessa, the group's depressive, who finds herself wildly unnerved at the prospect of finding joy in romance. Lindsay Mendez brings enormous warmth and a sneaky sense of humor to the role of Laura, the last to leave Jordan behind, who is bewildered to find herself the object of his rage. Barbara Barrie provides crucial emotional balance as Jordan's tough-loving grandmother, who refuses to find anything good in getting older. John Behlmann offers a pair of incisive cameos, as the beautiful, opaque Will, and as Laura's new love, who gently, but firmly, lets Jordan know that he has been displaced. Luke Smith amuses in a trio of roles, especially as a distinctly unromantic acquaintance who dismisses Jordan's assertion that he doesn't believe in casual sex with withering scorn. ("It's not like religion. Casual sex is not something you can choose to believe in or not. It exists.")

Cullman's production is hampered a bit by Mark Wendland's set, an overcomplicated arrangement of boxes and levels that leaves Japhy Weideman, the lighting designer, struggling to find enough positions to provide sufficient coverage of each brief scene. However, Kaye Voyce's costumes find wicked fun in a pair of appalling bridesmaid's gowns outfitted with the terrible hats that minor members of the Windsor clan wear to royal weddings. And Daniel Kluger's sound design is alive to the comic possibilities of a wedding march degenerating into a country music hoedown; he also earns laughs with the canny use of Celine Dion's "Because You Loved Me" as the soundtrack to a wedding reception.

Because it is essentially a warm-hearted comedy, Significant Other ends on a note of reconciliation. And yet its final image is of Jordan alone, watching yet another wedding dance that doesn't include him. It's impossible not to feel for him, even as we recognize that his story is far from over. Is his unhappiness a product of youth and inexperience? Absolutely. Does this make it any less painful? Not a bit. -- David Barbour