Lobby Hero is a play about the way we justify ourselves to ourselves. A realistic drama with a few flourishes of situation comedy and a philosophical undergirding, this 2001 Kenneth Lonergan play is set just inside and just outside the doors of a not-quite-luxury Manhattan apartment building, its foyer filled with four characters who more or less believe pinning on a badge confers some privileged sense of right and wrong.
The flimsier badges belong to Jeff (Michael Cera) and William (Brian Tyree Henry), a slacker security guard and his straight-laced supervisor. The other two are modeled by Bill (Chris Evans, yes, the Captain America Chris Evans) and Dawn (Bel Powley), a veteran cop and his squeaky-voiced probationer. On David Rockwell’s slow and sometimes awkward revolve, their paths keep criss-crossing – the lobby is a small one – mostly because Bill is sleeping with a divorcee upstairs. When William’s brother is arrested, Bill involves himself in that case, too.
These characters have complicated decisions to make, many of them about what they should or shouldn’t say. (This is Lonergan. Talk matters.) They claim strict standards – “Where I come from you stick up for your friends no matter what,” says Bill. “Stick to the rules,” says William. But when it comes down to moral absolutism versus moral relativism, turns out it’s all relative. As the play progresses, we watch them try to rationalize their ethical pick-and-mix to each other and themselves.
There are a few fixed points in Lonergan’s plays and films: a sympathy for fuck-ups, an anatomizing of queasy ethical quandaries, an extraordinary and sympathetic ear for everyday dialogue. He is the best writer of realistic speech working today and if his characters are not always articulate, he never condescends to them. He knows how we talk when we’re frazzled, nervous, outraged, and that’s the gift he gives his actors and his audience.
His plays sound like life and at a preview performance the crowd engaged with the characters as though they were alive, groaning and cheering and finger-snapping. Under Trip Cullman’s direction the acting is mostly extraordinary. Michael Cera is doing his typical high-voiced friendly slacker thing and Powley is feisty, though her role is less fully written than the others. Henry is a standout, with his sturdy physicality and his easy authority. He shows William’s helpless determination to make the right call and the ways that his choices undermine his sense of self. Evans is a surprise, much more than an action hero trying to prove that he’s still got it. His Bill, a fine cop and a lousy human, is a monster you can often empathize with. He’s a study in how self-belief is a lot more dangerous than self-doubt. As Jeff says: “He’s just very self-assured, obviously, but he’s also like a total scumbag and I’m just wondering if you can have one without the other.”
Making bad decisions will never go out of style, but this play is maybe too stylish. Leaving aside the writerly manipulation used to shove the characters into quandaries, the corners cut to gin up the audience, the play is an awkward fit for the current Broadway season in part because it’s such an accidentally fist-on-the-buzzer response to the present moment.
Because of the prominence of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, some of the plot points are less knotty and they’re received with less nuance. William is over a smaller barrel than he used to be and when Dawn finds a way to undercut her partner, it’s a moral compromise, but her big speech is met with whoops and you-go-girl applause rather than the skepticism it deserves. The script isn’t out-and-out woke. It still demands that the only female character transfer her affections from a jerk to a screw-up and its examination of white make privilege only goes so far. But mostly it’s aged too well.
Is what’s good for society sometimes bad for drama? That’s a quandary for the audience.
