Theatre in Review: Are You There, McPhee? (McCarter Theatre Center)

In a promotional interview for Are You There, McPhee?, John Guare says, "It's the kind of play I like. We turn on the television to see that which we're going to know and we come to the theatre to see that which we don't know...I seek out the indefinable." On that point, anyway, he has succeeded brilliantly. I think it's safe to say that most of the audience at the performance I attended hadn't the faintest idea of what they were seeing. I count myself among them.

A festival of disparate theatrical techniques (scenic gags, projections, sound effects, and puppets large and small) and various styles and tones (farce, horror, fantasy, mystery), and a frantic exercise in name-dropping (Borges, Hitchcock, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, Walt Disney, René Magritte, Roman Polanski, P. L. Travers, and I don't know who else), Are You There, McPhee? is the most hirsute of shaggy dog stories, a bewildering series of events that twist, turn, and fold back on themselves as in a Mobius strip. Among the topics passing through its head, in no particular order, are adultery, murder, suicide, fame (and the lack thereof), psychiatry, drug addiction, real estate, and pedophilia -- the last point brought up rather gingerly, as if the author wanted to give us a good shock, but somehow lacked the nerve. Is there a point to it all? Yes, according to the production notes. But you'll have to look long and hard at the McCarter's Berlind stage to find any connection.

Guare's protagonist, Edmund Gowery -- listed as "Mundie" in the program, a detail that suggests the script has been subject to revisions -- is a playwright of a certain age, known mostly for one youthful Off Broadway success, a maudlin-sounding family drama titled The Internal Structure of Stars. At a cocktail party where the guests are telling stories, he comes up with a real corker. It begins in 1975, when Gowery, having earned a $20,000 windfall from his play, decides, at the advice of his lawyer, Andy, to sink the money into a house in Nantucket. It's a decision he comes to regret almost immediately, when his tenants are accused of running a child-pornography ring and the police demand his presence in Nantucket. His interview with the authorities is something of a disaster for a reason that, amusingly, will recur throughout the play; virtually everyone Gowery meets in Nantucket took part in a local production of The Internal Structure of Stars, which he declined to see. The fact that he can't remember the tiniest detail of this incident only further inflames the ire of the natives -- each of whom takes time to assure him that their production was better than the New York original.

The rest of Are You There, McPhee? traces how Gowery ends up a virtual prisoner in a Nantucket house belonging to Elsie, the heiress to a famed series of children's books -- who either jumped from or was pushed through a high window -- and her husband, Schuyler, a wheeler-dealer who is in Hollywood, peddling the classic stories to the Disney Organization. As Gowery tries to keep this benighted couple's hellion children, named Poe and Lilac, from running amok, a parade of bizarre characters passes through, adding to the chaos. It will probably do the cause of clarity no good whatsoever to note that Gowery is cuckolding Andy, who has repaired with his wife to Buenos Aires, leaving Gowery without assistance; that Elsie may or may not have had an affair with a character named McPhee, who may or may not be a ghost, but who, in any case, knows how to electrocute a lobster; and that the children's caretakers include a neurotic young couple named Peter and Wendy, given to handing out Ritalin like candy (her) and coughing up blood (him), and Aunt Bitsy, a bombshell with Veronica Lake hair and Lauren Bacall's larynx, who is also a drug-pushing psychiatrist.

Then again, this admittedly tangled summary leaves out the many appearances, in puppet form, of Jorge Luis Borges; the house decorated à la Magritte, complete with a train jutting out of the fireplace; the brief scenes from a proposed Polanski remake of Hitchcock's Suspicion, starring Fonda and Redford (and yes, they're puppets); the fact that Elsie's body is scheduled to arrive by parcel post; and the fact that everybody is obsessed with reading or seeing Jaws. (There are so many literary and pop culture references that a good alternate title might be Grand Allusion.) Other stray details -- the adults keep Poe and Lilac tranquil by reading to them from the works of Primo Levi; Gowery's girlfriend is "political correspondent and skin care editor at Seventeen magazine;" and dialogue that runs along the lines of "Walt Disney is God's apology for the Holocaust" -- give you a sense of what you're in for. Guare's last work, A Free Man of Color, may have been overstuffed and occasionally sophomoric, but it was bold, risky, and possessed of a young man's energy and vision. In contrast, Are You There, McPhee? is dithery, half-hearted, a jumble of characters and ideas crying out for some kind of organizing principle.

The director, Sam Buntrock, does his level best to impose some kind of order on these ADD-afflicted proceedings, and all praise to him for keeping the action moving at a swift pace. As Gowery, the fine Canadian actor Paul Gross is put through an endurance test; rarely leaving the stage for a second, he is both protagonist and narrator, and I can't begin to list the indignities that he is asked to suffer. Suffice it to say that, even if his character makes little or no sense, he delivers every line with remarkable elan. A number of familiar faces turn up, including Jeremy Bobb as Andy, Patrick Carroll as a truculent cop, and Danny Mastrogiorgio as Schuyler, who, in a moment of inspiration, tries to do a deal with Disney and Roman Polanski, but neither they nor anyone else in the cast can do much with the unfunny caricatures that have been dealt to them. (I did rather enjoy Lusia Strus as the terrifyingly assured Aunt Bitsy and a real estate agent named Selena Godot.)

David Farley's set design, beginning on what looks like a bare stage, includes the Magritte house interior, a forced-perspective take on Elsie's living room, and various other locations; some modest, uncredited projection work includes a movie marquee and a shadow-play version of Jaws; Farley's costumes are pretty accurate copies of '60s casual chic. (Also, there are the puppets, including an irascible lobster and a Godzilla-sized, if only partially visible, Walt Disney.) Ken Billington's lighting and Jill BC DuBoff's sound are both fine.

In the end, we are told that all of this is meant to be a parable of growing up, of how Gowery, at the not-so-tender age of 35, learned to put away childish things. On that point, you'll have to take the author's word. Guare is one of our finest and most distinctive playwrights -- aside from the near-classic status of The House of Blue Leaves, I wouldn't change one word of Rich and Famous, Bosoms and Neglect, Six Degrees of Separation, and even A Free Man of Color. (His screenplay for Atlantic City is one of American cinema's underrated gems.) But this time out, he has written a ghost story without mystery, a comedy lacking in laughs, and a bildungsroman with a protagonist who fails to engage. Late in the play, Gowery muses on the Robert Altman film Nashville, in which "so many simple threads" form to "make a complex pattern." How unlike Are You There, McPhee?, in which the threads are hopelessly snarled, forming a kind of Gordian knot.--David Barbour