The English have the perfect expression for it: "Stop windmilling about." Waving your hands and arms in constant motion as you talk on and on won't make your relatively inconsequential concerns more important; it will only fan them to no effect. Jack Finnegan, the amiable enough writer and performer of this 95-minute piece, apparently feels the opposite: that exaggeration for emphasis must be physical, at least from the waist up. He should have credited an upper-body choreographer in the program, but I have a feeling that it was all his idea, and that director Tralen Doler not only did nothing to stop him but, as a choreographer himself, encouraged the whole thing. The result feels like a lecture for somewhat slow children: Finnegan talks of having two beers and holds up two fingers, as if we in the audience couldn't count that high. His train goes up a hill and his arms reach for the heights. No matter how mundane the subject matter, it must be arm-danced to.
On top of that, Finnegan's narrative is mostly prosaic: middle-of-the-night embarking on and disembarking from trains, overheard repetitive conversations that weren't that interesting to begin with, drinks in a bar, an absinthe hangover, and some once-removed observations about familiar places in America. His major topic is his 13-month journey, mostly by train, to 21 cities around the rim of the United States (Omaha, Denver, St. Louis, and Salt Lake City are among the missing). The reason for this solo vagabondage is never fully explained. Was it a much-delayed gap year, escaping a broken romance, searching for self? Surely it wasn't for the purpose of writing this play, which applies a surfeit of self-conscious poetry to undeserving details and is delivered at a rapid clip. Finnegan comes off as having spent at most 36 hours in each city and has reduced his chat about them to around three minutes apiece. What's the damned hurry? Perhaps he fears that the "family" will grow bored with his digital-era equivalent of vacation slides. Come to think of it, most of the content could have been tweeted or texted—and probably was originally, given his self-described love of digital media.
Sometimes Finnegan's phrasemaking trumps facts. Chattanooga is hardly the "eastern edge of the Bible Belt." Take that both Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia! He perpetuates dated cliché putdowns of Cleveland and Los Angeles. Durham has long not been "a small tobacco town" unworthy of his attention. There hasn't been any tobacco processed there for decades, but the city has embraced one of the world's great universities. (Finnegan explains this away by characterizing Duke University as a separate city from Durham, when in fact their meshing is a model for other college towns.)
The second, shorter part of the program is an apparently new paean to some of the seamier streets and denizens of Manhattan and a bit of Brooklyn. Finnegan was still reading this portion, not yet off book two nights before opening. (His costume change to a semiacademic brown corduroy jacket and the music stand fooled no one. This was no planned professorial lecture, merely a shortage of rehearsal time.) Not to worry, though. Finnegan already had his post-interval windmilling down pat.
Presented by Four Fins Ink as part of Americas Off Broadway at 59E59 Theaters, 59 E. 59th St., NYC. May 6–15. Tue.–Thu. 7:30 p.m.; Fri., 8:30 p.m.; Sat., 2:30 and 8:30 p.m.; Sun., 3:30 and 7:30 p.m. (212) 279-4200 or www.ticketcentral.com.