Theatre in Review: Middle of the Night (Keen Company/Theatre Row)The Keen Company revival of Middle of the Night is a deeply revealing event; it makes clear why Paddy Chayefsky's play ran 477 performances in the 1956 - 57 Broadway season and also why it has never been revived. Chayefsky is best remembered as the bombastic screenwriter behind such cinematic screeds as Network and The Hospital. (Dave Itzkoff's new book, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, memorializes Chayefsky in his Old Testament prophet period.) But before that, during his heyday in television's first golden age, he was the poet of the little guy, specializing in such low-key kitchen-sink fare as Marty and The Catered Affair. In these works, he displayed an uncanny ability at getting under the skin of his working-stiff characters, examining their hearts with the gentlest of scalpels. Middle of the Night, seen at the Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse before moving to the ANTA Playhouse (now the August Wilson Theatre), is distinguished by two remarkable characterizations, and the good news is that Jonathan Silverstein's production for Keen Company is blessed with actors who can do them justice. Indeed, Middle of the Night is about two people, each of whom, surrounded by friends and family, is dying of loneliness. First up is Betty, a pretty young thing of 20 who works as a receptionist in a garment firm. With her looks, she should have everything going for her, yet already, her life has derailed. Her marriage to George, a musician, has quickly foundered; as she candidly explains it to her uncomprehending mother, they have a physical connection but nothing else. Now George is taking a long-term gig in Vegas and isn't especially interested in having her come along; as a result, she has fled their apartment in the Middle of the Night and is anxiously trying to figure out her next move. Her mother, still smarting over being abandoned by her husband years before, doesn't see any problem: "As long as you get along in bed, that's the whole thing," she says. Betty's friend Marilyn is hardly more sympathetic, insisting that Betty has a good marriage and had better stick with it. Listening to this dubious advice, Nicole Lowrance captures Betty's innate sadness and her bewilderment at finding herself disappointed so soon. Betty works for Jerry, a widower in his early 50s who is wondering if the clock isn't running out on any chance for happiness. A fling with a middle-aged buyer from a local department store has led nowhere, and increasingly, he spends his nights at home with his spinster sister, logging a couple of hours in front of the television before an early bedtime. His social life has devolved down to dinner once or twice a week with his daughter and son-in-law in Larchmont. He nervously keeps tabs on his business partner, who deals with advancing age by getting drunk and chasing after call girls. To his worried relatives, Jerry keeps insisting that he's just a little depressed, but it is clearly more than that; his options are diminishing fast, leaving him with no palatable choices. Watching Jonathan Hadary, as Jerry, trying to explain away his unhappiness -- not even really believing the explanation himself -- is to experience a fine actor who has mastered the art of revealing the emotions hidden behind his character's anodyne words. Chayefsky is aces at depicting Betty and Jerry's dilemmas, and, later, when they have really gotten to know each other and marriage may be in the offing, he whips up a couple of highly plausible domestic storms. Betty's mother is openly hostile to Jerry, whom she considers a dirty old man. (Casting Hadary, who is 68, as the 53-year-old Jerry, really emphasizes the age spread between him and the baby-faced Lowrance.) Jerry's sister is frankly terrified at the idea of living alone, and his daughter, a budding Electra who clearly believed she had ownership of her father in his sunset years, is no more sympathetic. The scenes of family infighting are tough, funny, and marked by Chayefsky's radar ear for the way these mid-century Upper West Siders talk. The only trouble is, Chayefsky can't really make Betty and Jerry into a plausible couple. We don't see them getting to know each other, so the nature of their attraction isn't entirely clear. Then again, it is: Betty, who never knew her father, is clearly pleased to land an older man's attentions, and Jerry, who, by his own admission, spent his life with an immature wife, is enchanted by the impulsive, often childish, Betty. Whether or not this is a solid basis for a marriage, I will leave to you, but it isn't a confidence-builder that their only attempt at sexual encounter is more or less a bust. (As Jerry admits in a moment of candor, their connection "isn't in the muscles; it isn't in the fingers.") Chayefsky stacks the deck by making all the other, more conventional marriages on stage into largely miserable affairs, but this begs the question of what Betty and Jerry really have going for them. They aren't even married yet, and still you find yourself wondering, can this marriage be saved? Still, thanks to the meticulous work of Hadary, Lowrance, and a solid supporting cast, Middle of the Night bristles with dramatic confrontations on the way to its not-entirely-believable fairytale ending. Amelia Campbell is convincing as Betty's empty-headed mother and is really touching as a widow who, making small talk with Jerry, advertises her availability a little too obviously. Denise Lute is first-rate as Jerry's sister, always ready with a plate of fruit and a pot of coffee when a family conference is in the offing. Melissa Miller is fine as Jerry's devoted, yet deeply conflicted, daughter, as is Todd Bartels as Jerry's henpecked son-in-law, who just wants his wife to come to Miami for a vacation. However, Bartels is not well-cast as Betty's husband; the character, a narcissistic hunk of beefcake, needs another type of actor altogether. There are also some difficulties with the production design. Steven C. Kemp has designed a single apartment setting that is meant to represent the apartments belonging to Betty's mother and Jerry; the result is a single undecorated space that doesn't suit either task. Jonathan Spencer's lighting and Obadiah Eaves' sound are perfectly okay, and Jennifer Paar's costumes are better than that, a collection of thoroughly authentic examples of mid-'50s work and leisure wear. (It's funny to note how overdressed, by today's standards, the female characters are, when, say, attending a bridge game.) In the years before he became famous for penning jeremiads -- the film critic Dwight MacDonald once notoriously wrote, "Paddy Chayefsky's ear for dialogue is in full cauliflower" -- the playwright had a real knack for capturing the way his characters talked. His skill at revelatory monologues is on full display here, too, and his way with words makes most of Middle of the Night a pleasure. Whether you buy the ending is another question. Me, I give them six months. --David Barbour 
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