Theatre in Review: Prodigal Son (Manhattan Theatre Club/City Center Stage I)

	Robert Sean Leonard, Timothée Chalamet. Photo: Joan Marcus

If you're going to write a memory play, the memories have to be sharper and more detailed that those that John Patrick Shanley has summoned up for Prodigal Son. The playwright says in a program note that he has drawn on his experience as a student at a Catholic prep school in New Hampshire in the mid-1960s. "I was from the Bronx," he writes, "rather violent, a bit delusional, hungry for all kinds of things, and wild-eyed as a rescue dog." Or, as one of his teachers in the play puts it, "He's the most interesting mess we have this year."

This comment marks the one promise on which Prodigal Son thoroughly delivers. Jim Quinn, the young Shanley character, is a Bronx street kid, utterly lost both in the wilds of New England and in the faux-WASP atmosphere of an institution that is, essentially, a kind of Catholic imitation of Groton. (I've never heard of a Catholic institution of learning that didn't count a significant number of religious orders among its staff; whether this is a telling detail or merely an omission never becomes clear.) Jim combines a borderline feral personality, an almost compulsive need to break the rules -- he drinks, he steals, he beats up younger students -- with a powerful, if undisciplined, intellect and an insatiable hunger for books. Shanley has gifted the boy with arias in which he can pour out his fierce, profoundly troubled soul, showing us how, for Jim, ideas are matters of life and death. The opinions pour out in cataracts -- about Plato, Socrates, Thomas More, T. S. Eliot, and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. (In moments of stress, he is most likely to call upon Rafael Sabatini, author of such swashbucklers as Captain Blood.) He writes disturbing poems that pose intractable moral questions concerning the Nazis and the Jews. He gets away with a surprising amount of impertinence among his teachers, if only because he argues his points so well. The young actor Timothée Chalamet captures the exact temperature of Jim's fevered intellect, guiding us expertly through the logical hairpin turns and alarming mood swings that make him such a bracing, if exhausting, fellow to have around.

And yet, for all his posing, raging, and verbal pyrotechnics, Jim remains strangely at a remove from us; there's much too much that we don't know about him. As one of the adults comments, "He's using poetry like a ladder to climb out of some terrible place" -- but we never get a clear reading on what that place might be. There are hints about how trapped he feels at home: He denounces the Catholic school he attended in the Bronx as killingly dreary, and he bitterly comments, "My parents named me to work in the sanitation department." We also learn in passing that he was briefly involved with Opus Dei, the ultraconservative, and highly controversial, Catholic cult -- an eyebrow-raising detail that is mentioned once, then dropped. He is the oddest of cases: a character so vividly rendered on one level and totally opaque on another.

We are told that Jim's hellion behavior has had a destabilizing effect on the school, but we have to take this on faith, as it isn't ever shown. It seems certain that Jim is looking for a father figure who will give him a clue about living in the world and harnessing the self-destructive impulses that haunt him. Indeed, one feels his confusion deeply because the play's two male influences are so palely drawn. Carl Schmitt, the founder and headmaster, believes that the school's purpose is to inculcate sound values, which is one reason he always seems to be threatening Jim with expulsion. There's not much more to Carl than that; given his one-note personality and slight tendency toward the stentorian, he is something of a bore, redeemed only by his deep attachment to his wife (who teaches poetry seminars) and the past tragedy that is affixed to him without sufficient exploration. None of this is the fault of Chris McGarry, who works hard, and sometimes successfully, at making us understand Carl's insistence that rigorously following the rules -- in school, religion, and life -- is the only sure guard against moral chaos.

Somewhat more intriguing is Alan Hoffman, the literature professor, who is Jim's main benefactor, tolerating his sometimes insufferable behavior for the sake of his "extraordinary mind." Without explicitly saying so, we are made to understand that Alan inhabits the closet, and may have played a role in the attempted suicide of another student. It's easy to see that he is smitten with Jim -- but Shanley leaves this potentially explosive situation to so late that, when it finally erupts, it fizzles. The character is so underwritten, and occupies so little of the play's short 90-minute running time, that one might legitimately wonder why an actor of Robert Sean Leonard's stature was drawn to it. He does capture Alan's studiedly casual manner, however, giving us a sense of a man who lives in a kind of cloister, carefully indulging his emotions only in charged friendships with select students.

The playwright forces a climax that tries to address this and several other key points, but it is little more than a hurried, unsatistfactory attempt at wrapping up the play in a single grand gesture. There are other compensations. Annika Boras is appealing as Carl's wife and another of Jim's champions, whose keen interest in Margaret Sanger and John Rock, the Catholic inventor of the birth control pill, identify her as being much more liberal than her spouse. (The play unfolds in the high summer of Vatican II, when many Catholics thought that the Church would ultimately permit birth control for married couples, a hope that was put paid to by the publishing of Paul VI's encyclical, Humanae Vitae.) David Potters is solid as Jim's roommate, a much more typical member of the student body.

Some reviewers have commented that Prodigal Son might have benefited from a director other than Shanley, but, in addition to assembling a fine cast, he has gotten excellent work from his designers. Santo Loquasto's set places a kind of doll-house version of the school upstage, with arrays of leafless trees at right and left; various wagons roll on, quickly and silently, for such locations as Jim's dorm room, the Schmitts' dining room, Alan's quarters, and several other locations. The evocative and efficient set design is augmented by Natasha Katz's sensitive lighting, Jennifer von Mayrhauser's subtly realized period costumes, and Fitz Patton's sound, which provides reinforcement for Paul Simon's original music and also contributes some key effects, including the tolling of bells and the ticking of clocks.

This material is sufficiently rich that one hopes that Shanley will revisit it and give it a more expansive treatment. It might even prove more successful in prose form, focusing on Jim's moral and intellectual education and dispensing with the need to impose some kind of central conflict on it. In its current state, it feels oddly sketchy, almost like a rough draft. It's hard not to feel that if a less well-known playwright had submitted this script, it almost certainly would have been sent back for further development.-- David Barbour