Theatre in Review: The Nap (Manhattan Theatre Club/Samuel J. Friedman Theatre) Even if the publicity materials for The Nap didn't reveal that playwright Richard Bean started out in standup comedy, a few minutes at the Friedman would be enough to give away the game. That's because The Nap is a compendium of stray comic bits in search of a play. The title is an allusion to the surface of a snooker table, the sport around which the play's action, such as it is, whirls in stop-and-start fashion. The young hero, Dylan Spokes, has devoted himself to the game; he may have no money, no girlfriend, and no outside life, but it has provided him with a certain stability -- something his wildly dysfunctional family is uniquely ill equipped to offer. His father, Bobby, is an ex-junkie and drug dealer, now sleepwalking through a nowhere life. His mother, Stella, is the shadiest of ladies, whose latest scam is selling fake handicapped parking permits at twenty pounds a throw. Her new companion, Danny Killeen, is an odorous Irishman who makes a living taking driving tests for others. ("He's taken over four hundred tests," Stella notes. "And I've passed nearly two hundred," he adds, proudly.) Tony DanLino, Dylan's agent, is a shameless hustler, dressed from head to toe in shades of a single color, both eyes firmly fixed on a product endorsement deal. And then there's Dylan's sponsor, Waxy Bush -- you can imagine the fun Bean has with that name -- a male-to-female transgender gangster with a wooden left arm -- who, before her transition, was Stella's lover. (Waxy's male appendage, Stella asserts, was so large, "it was like a dead German hanging out the window.") Waxy is also the queen of malapropisms: "I live in hope," she says. "I am nothing if not an optometrist." Nosing around this group are Mohammad Butt and Eleanor Lavery, law enforcement officials hired to keep the upcoming championship match on the up-and-up; given his bizarre entourage, Dylan should be nervous about this. Then Waxy informs him that he is to throw a game, which cues one of the unlikelier plots to be seen in some time, a careless collection of incidents involving blackmail, murder, a Filipino gambling syndicate, and a massive con job -- culminating in an onstage snooker match for which the playwright has provided different endings, depending on who wins. Bean's last effort, One Man, Two Guvnors, also had a loose-limbed structure, throwing together various innocents, schemers, and criminal types in a series of interlocking plots, but that inspired effort was filtered through the sensibilities of the British music hall and Carry On films, combining scenes that played like comedy sketches with often delightfully irrelevant musical numbers. (It also had the benefit of its source material, The Servant of Two Masters, by Carlo Goldoni.) It was an unabashed spree, held together by the brilliance of top banana James Corden. The Nap, on the other hand, wants to be a play, but Bean's fixation on getting to the next joke, by any means necessary, proves to be deeply undermining. Sometimes, his comic aim is true: "Is Waxy a big risk taker?" wonders Tony. "He had a sex change operation," replies the disbelieving Bobby. But, much of the time, the laughs are imported from the farthest reaches of left field. Bobby, looking at a years-old newspaper, crows with delight that Robin Gibb is dead. "Why is that 'brilliant/fantastic'?" asks Dylan. "Cheers me up every time a vegetarian dies of cancer," Bobby says. On the subject of that dread disease, there's this exchange: Waxy: How's your terminal colon cancer? Bobby: I don't have terminal colon cancer. Waxy: Stella told me you had terminal colon cancer and three months to live. Bobby: That explains the "get well soon card." When all else fails, Waxy is around to make pronouncements like "If God gives you only lemons, make some marmalade." Even the genuinely funny lines have a lifted-from-the-sitcoms quality, as when Eleanor warns Dylan, "Women can be violent. Joan of Arc. Medea. Naomi Campbell." It doesn't help that the action moves with a surprisingly slowly -- a quality only aggravated by Daniel Sullivn's pokey direction -- or that the action hinges on a twist that makes nonsense of everything you've seen before, followed by a climax -- admittedly punctuated with amusingly unctuous color commentary -- that amounts to the playwright throwing his hands in the air and bringing down the curtain with almost nothing resolved. Sullivan has assembled a first-class cast to portray these seedy second-raters, and everyone gives it his or her all -- which, sometimes, is enough. As Dylan, Ben Schnetzer admirably plays straight man to everyone else, even when his romantic subplot with Eleanor proceeds bumpily, thanks to Heather Lind's frantic signaling that the lady isn't all that she seems. John Ellison Conlee underplays expertly as Bobby, and when he gets a genuinely original line, he lands the laugh without fail. (Dylan, refusing a seafood sandwich, says, "I don't eat anything with a brain, do I?" "They're shrimps, not novelists," snaps Bobby.) Johanna Day is amusingly transparent as the grifter Stella, adopting and dropping maternal poses with alarming speed. Max Gordon Moore has a nice comic attack as Tony, but the character drops out of the action, for the actor to return as emcee of the climactic snooker match. Alexandra Billings does all that can be done with Waxy's many mispronouncements. As Danny and Mohammad, Thomas Jay Ryan and Bhavesh Patel struggle to make sense of their bizarre characters. The production is pleasingly slick; David Rockwell has provided sets depicting a low-rent snooker parlor, Dylan's hotel room (a shrine to one of the sport's greatest stars), Waxy's rural digs, and the locale of the final match, which comes complete with a video screen showing an overhead view of the snooker table. Justin Townsend's lighting is filled with attractive details, including a set of entertainingly gaga effects for the final scene. Kaye Voyce's costumes are appropriately over the top. Lindsay Jones' original music and sound effects are typically solid. But, as Waxy might say, it's all a lost pause, a tool's errand. In contrast to the tightly focused, rules-driven action of snooker, The Nap wanders all over the place, picking up laughs where it can find them, with little or no regard to the overall effect. It's a joke book masquerading as a play. -- David Barbour 
|
