Can you diagnose a Broadway show with narcissistic personality disorder?
If so, It’s Only a Play should be sprawled on some analyst’s couch every day of the week and twice on Saturdays. The dramatic equivalent of a selfie (which the characters actually take in the first act), Terrence McNally’s script is set at a celeb-packed opening night shindig. Upstairs, cast, creative, a more than usually repulsive critic and a coat-check boy await the opening night reviews. As the Broadway play within the play is titled The Golden Egg, a hash seems preordained.
It’s Only a Play debuted in 1985. As McNally had been working in the theater for 20 years without many successes, it’s a poison pen letter (and a bit of a valentine) to a business that hadn’t always dealt with him kindly. A couple of decades later, with a Pulitzer, an Emmy and a pile of Tony awards now cluttering his mantel, the play’s endless complaints seem less witty. How sincerely can you bemoan an institution that continues to top up your bank account?
Jimmy (Nathan Lane), a stage actor who packed it in for a long-running TV series, is at the party partly to cheer on his playwright friend Peter (Matthew Broderick) and partly to reassure himself that he made the right call when he turned down the lead. He’s joined by Stockard Channing as an actress who’s suffered a string of drug-related flops (think Lindsay Lohan with an AARP membership); Megan Mullaly as the ditzy producer with delusions of cultural relevance; Rupert Grint as the bad boy director; and F Murray Abraham as the repugnant reviewer. All genuflect at the altar of self-involvement. Sometimes literally.
But then so does the play. If you removed all of the bold-faced names and navel-gazing, you’d be left with a Beckett short. All the complaints about Broadway (it’s soulless, it’s unimaginative, it’s Brit-obsessed) aren’t exactly news. Then again, a lot of the play’s up-to-the-minuteness is amusing in a cheap and bright and disposable sort of way, the theatrical equivalent of fast fashion.
Many of the most enduring jokes are the most vulgar. Abraham’s Ira asks Peter if he’d do anything for a good review. “Put a bag over your head and I’d fuck you for one,” says Peter in offhand tones. Happily, the director Jack O’Brien is sufficiently practiced to keep even the more sanitary punch lines coming quick and fast. Lane is delightful, Abraham sleazy and Micah Stock makes a fine debut as the cutie coat-check. But the rest of the cast work very hard for only moderate results. Grint flails except for a brief puppetry scene, while Mullaly struggles to project. Channing has terrific instincts, but plastic surgery and/or make-up applied with a trowel limit her expressiveness, while Broderick just seems tired.
“It takes a very special maniac to produce a play,” Mullaly’s Julia insists. In the case of this often funny, ultimately wearying and incontrovertibly star-stacked revival, just a very cynical one.
