Theatre in Review: Rocket to the Moon (Peccadillo Theater Company/Theatre at St. Clement's)

	Ned Eisenberg, Marilyn Matarrese. Photo Carol Rosegg

The presence of a young, pretty assistant lays bare a host of discontents, not all of them erotic, in a Manhattan dentist's office in Rocket to the Moon. Like The Big Knife, this 1938 drama is one of Clifford Odets' minor efforts, managing a middling Broadway run and living on in revival without achieving the stature of Waiting for Lefty or Awake and Sing!. Seen in a mostly solid production directed by Dan Wackerman, one sees why it has never made it onto the classics shelf: Odets' diagnosis of America's spiritual and economic malaise is far more acute than his analysis of his characters' troubled hearts.

In 1938, it was common to see a career in medicine as a fast track to prosperity -- the idea is still popular today -- but the doctors in Rocket to the Moon are a bunch of working stiffs, barely holding their practices together over the course a hot Manhattan summer. There's Walter "Frenchy" Jensen, a podiatrist, who, lacking patients, spends his afternoons reading and napping. There's Phil Cooper, whose business is in freefall and professional habits are decaying: "Maybe it's coffee I smell," remarks a female visitor about the cup in his hand. "Yeah," he replies. "Scotch coffee." Later on, he takes up selling his blood to help pay the rent.

And then there's Ben Stark, also a dentist, and a guy living in a permanent bind. He never aspired to a DDS degree, and, hitting 40, he finds himself in professional and personal rut, marking time in a Midtown office, wondering where the days are going. His wealthy father-in-law is willing to take a stake in a better office further uptown, which would at least help him get ahead, but his wife, Belle, is estranged from the old man and won't hear a word of it. Anyway, she says, why take such a big risk?

The Stark marriage is less an alliance of true hearts than a contract that must be honored, but Ben and Belle appear to have a weary, tolerant affection for each other. "You know as much about women as the man in the moon," she informs him, but she has him in her neatly manicured grip and both of them know it. At the moment, however, Belle isn't too happy about Cleo Singer, the new nurse. Cleo is pretty easy on the eyes, and, if you don't mind her Bronx whine, she makes an altogether fetching addition to an office suite full of weary, middle-aged men. A sometime chorus dancer and a bit of a fabulist -- she insists she comes from a wealthy family -- she nevertheless makes little impression on Ben until she announces, out of the blue, that she is in love with him.

Soon Ben is stepping out with Cleo behind Belle's back, even as Cleo keeps company with two other gentlemen, a high-stress situation that becomes even more fraught when Belle finds out what is going on. But happiness isn't in the offing for any of the characters in Rocket to the Moon. As Frenchy notes, "Who's got the time and place for love?" And, as always in Odets' plays, any attempt at a real, satisfying human connection is derailed by the need for money and social status. Stark's hot office, empty of patients, stands in for the brutal, degrading world of American capitalism. Everyone is too busy trying to get ahead -- or at least survive -- to really love another person.

Reflective of a time when Odets' life seemed to be falling apart -- the Depression still lingered and Europe teetered on the brink of war, while Odets' marriage to Luise Rainer wasn't going well and his creative home, the Group Theatre, was rife with internecine conflict -- Rocket to the Moon is a personal cri de cœur that might still resonate today, but for one thing: Odets never gets around to dramatizing the romance at the play's heart. If we're to believe that Ben's stable, stifling existence is really threatened, there should be something -- a spark of passion, a sense of two lost souls coming together -- between him and Cleo. Instead, it comes across as a pro forma device, a reason to cue the play's many speeches about the lousy way things are. Ned Eisenberg and Katie McClellan are perfectly plausible as Ben and Cleo -- he has a nice smile that signals all sorts of submerged pain and she can make a small gesture, such as tossing her office keys on the desk in resignation, seem freighted with meaning. But if their relationship never compels, and if Eisenberg never comes across as a dull, well-meaning guy suddenly shaken by passion, the fault lies as much with Odets as with the actors or director.

Still, Rocket to the Moon vibrates to the sound of Odets' distinctive New York patois, which blends lofty rhetoric and moony poetic allusions with acid wisecracks right out of a Warner Brothers triple feature. Some of his dialogue still crackles, and some feels like it has been left out to defrost too long, but all of it is great fun to hear, especially when delivered by a cast that knows what's what. "A woman wants to live with a man, not next to him," says Belle, summing up her not-really-happy marriage. "Every woman wants to convert a man -- to the gospel of herself," observes Mr. Prince, Belle's father." Noting Cleo's effect on Ben, Frenchy, a veritable thesaurus of jaded opinions, comments, "She's got you like an iceberg, three-quarters under water." Later, he adds, "Love to most people is a curious sensation below the Equator." In a line that sounds more like a spoof of Odets, Frenchy warns Cleo, "I'm not sure what's going on in that fertile brain, Juicy Fruit, but you've stripped your gears with me."

Except for the difficulty of bringing alive the affair between Ben and Cleo, the cast, under Wackerman's direction, makes Odets' gloriously purple dialogue sound like real speech. Marilyn Matarrese makes Belle into a prize bully, then reveals a real vein of fear at her core when she realizes that Ben might really be serious about Cleo; she provides some of the production's most incisive work. Larry Bull's Phil is a pitiable, scattered creature, full of nervous tics. (Getting water from the office cooler, he always pronounces it "municipal champagne.") Jonathan Hadary is a sly, sideways presence as Mr. Prince, who won't even speak to Belle -- "I am the American King Lear," he informs Ben -- and who is ready to marry Cleo himself if Ben won't snap her up. As Frenchy, commenting sourly from the sidelines, Michael Keyloun handles the ripest dialogue like a golden-era Hollywood pro. (Think Ray Milland or John Payne.) Lou Liberatore makes the most of the smallish role of the Broadway dance director who wants to share lunch, among other things, with Cleo.

This naturalistic drama benefits from Harry Feiner's set, depicting Ben's waiting room, with several large windows offering a view onto the street. If the atmosphere feels hot and humid, it is due at least to Feiner's lighting, as well. At least for the women, the costume designer, Amy C. Bradshaw, seems to have taken contemporary items and tried to style them for the late '30s, an effort that doesn't always work; the men's suits are much better. David Thomas' sound design draws on a playlist of period jazz tunes, but in some cases, he has chosen arrangements that are more suggestive of the 1950s than the '30s.

If Rocket to the Moon is less than a success for the casual theatregoer, it is a must-see for Odets fans and theatre history buffs. Whatever the play's faults, whenever Odets evokes the discontents of "a life where every day is Monday," he is in his element. -- David Barbour