Here is the paradox at the shrunken heart of Jack Thorne’s Sunday: how did the same playwright who won a Tony for writing about time-traveling boy wizards manage to make a discussion of Anne Tyler so wildly implausible?
In Sunday, at the Atlantic Theater, five twentysomethings gather for a meeting of their book group. They plan to drink vodka and parse dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. It all sounds likely enough.
But nothing about this play, from the characters, to the circumstances, to the structure, to even the choice of book feels truthful. (Would imagined intellectuals pick a normcore author like Tyler?) The relationships, which apparently go back years, don’t feel lived in, neither does the milieu. Director Lee Sunday Evans’s production includes several sequences where the music swells and the lights shift and the characters execute dance routines. These could be efforts to jolt the play out of naturalism, but it mostly looks like the actors are trying to escape.
One character, Alice, a would-be writer, perches both inside and outside the action, divulging, preciously, the characters’ back stories. We meet Marie, a publishing washout; Jill, her more successful roommate Milo, Jill’s rich, entitled boyfriend; Keith, Milo’s less entitled schoolmate; and Alice, Milo’s childhood friend. Though they’re meant to discuss Tyler, they mostly hassle each other with jejune thought experiments and occasional invective. Approached generously, it’s a play about moving through the world when you haven’t figured out who you are in it. Less generously, it isn’t about much of anything.
Maybe Thorne, who is 40, doesn’t actually know how younger people speak. Maybe setting a play in America wrongfooted him. Maybe all those years spent working on Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and King Kong have severely compromised how unmagical, non-simian creatures think and speak and behave. He doesn’t seem to like any of these people, with the possible exception of Marie (Sadie Scott) and her creepy downstairs neighbor (Maurice Jones), and he patronizes them terribly.
As the evening wore on and the other characters abandoned a despondent Marie, I worried that Sunday might be related to Franz Kroetz’s Request Concert, a disturbing, unbearable play about the last moments before a suicide. And then, after a two-person scene illustrating the peculiar male fantasy that a man can understand and deeply know a woman he has barely met, I started to think that the Kroetz play might be preferable.
Many of us join book groups for the same reasons that we might buy a ticket to the theater, as a prescribed way to socialize, as a prod to enculturate ourselves, as a way to experience a text both individually and collectively. (There are differences, of course, like drink prices. Advantage: Book group.) A good book discussion or a good play can promote satisfying personal reflection, as we confront how a work calls out to us and how we do or don’t answer that call.
But a solipsistic work like Sunday, with its brittle omniscience and its airy condescension, doesn’t seem interested in hearing what we have to say. Like the flash-forward ending, it’s all answers and no questions. At the end I watched as my hands applauded, aware that if Sunday had been a book, those same hands would have snapped it shut and pitched it against the nearest wall.
