If you took all the likes and kind ofs and whatevers and I means and you knows out of Neil LaBute’s The Way We Get By at Second Stage, what remained would barely make a one-act play. This two-character drama, set the morning after the night before, has perhaps 10 minutes of substantive conversation — some of it about Smartwater.
LaBute has his strengths — realistic-sounding dialogue, provocative situations, a way of saying things out loud that most of us keep to ourselves. But he has his weaknesses, too, chiefly an unbreakable habit of writing about characters who are less intelligent and less eloquent than he is — The Way We Get By being a case in point.
It concerns Doug (Thomas Sadoski of The Newsroom) and Beth (Amanda Seyfried of Mean Girls and Mamma Mia), circling each other awkwardly after an ostensibly passionate night that began at some “gathering thingy”. (As the actors have little chemistry, we have to take that passion on faith.) These two have known each other a long time and have conflicted feelings about falling into bed together. Of course, this relationship is more complicated than it at first appears, but the shocking reveal, which LaBute delays for 50 minutes, isn’t especially shocking. If you’ve seen his series Billy & Billie, then it isn’t shocking at all.
Before and after the supposed twist, Doug and Beth slouch around an anonymously tasteful living room, which looks cribbed from some article on budget-friendly design, in various states of undress. (Seyfried fans can enjoy a gratuitous flash of nipple, which comes shortly before lame dialogue about female sexual exploitation. Nice.) But mostly they manage to talk constantly without ever actually saying anything about themselves or their lives. We learn more about Beth’s unseen roommate Kim than we ever learn about Beth and nothing about Doug except for the fact that he once went to Comic-Con. And some of the few facts offered contradict themselves, like how light or heavily Beth sleeps.
Would it kill these people to say what they mean? Fluently? Efficiently? Here’s Beth, for example, articulating her attitude toward relationships: “My last thing ended not so long ago, and it was bad – I mean, not ‘bad’ bad but not great not even close to being good – so I’m kinda like whatever right now.”
Sadoski is a compelling actor with a distinct manic energy. Seyfried isn’t really a stage creature — sometimes she’s too internal, at other times too indicative, but she’s a capable actor. Beautiful, too. Leigh Silverman is a smart and sensitive director, but how much can you do with a play this middling, this contentless? The comedy isn’t as miserabilist as some of LaBute’s work, but it is insipid and trivial. As Beth might say, it’s kinda like whatever.
