Plays are like road trips. Sometimes they start full of optimism, and the ride is so smooth and uneventful that before you know it, you're getting on with whatever you aimed to do at your arrival place. Sometimes they start full of optimism, then you hit three potholes, the brakes fail, it's raining, and there's steam coming out of your radiator.
The first scene of Theresa Rebeck's The Scene is like the easier trip: jaunty, fun, and with Rebeck's trademark wit fully displayed. We're at a party where an unemployed, middle-aged actor, Charlie (Tony Shalhoub), and his best friend, Lewis (Christopher Evan Welch), are barely tolerating the innocuous babbling of Clea (Anna Camp), a young blonde new in New York from Ohio. No matter the topic, she inflects all her sentences like questions. Soon Clea recalls a recent temp-job interview with a certain woman -- a neurotic talk-show booker. Clea calls her a "Nazi priestess." Charlie calls her his wife. And blackout.
Especially as director Rebecca Taichman stages the play right before the blackout, we intuit two things: that we're likely to meet Stella (Patricia Heaton), which we do, and that her relationship with Charlie leaves much to be desired, which it does. No wonder: Stella's a tightly wound fussbudget obsessed with the idiocies and stupidities at her job, plus she's nervously preparing with Charlie to adopt a child. By contrast, Charlie hasn't much to do. He was only at the party to suck up to an old friend with a pilot in development. Later, as Lewis makes a play for Clea, Charlie bursts in, enraged at being humiliated by the old friend at a lunch meeting. Despite her Valley Girl-speak, Clea is smarter than she seems, and she makes a play for Charlie. They end up having an affair that wrecks his marriage -- and even worse. All in all, it's television-style fare, with blackouts and punch lines occurring where the commercials would be.
True, Rebeck tries innovating by giving Clea pungent powers of observation -- the wherewithal to articulate everyone's emotional failings -- but the script ultimately plays like a prime-time dramedy more than a stage work. Likewise, Shalhoub and Heaton offer a number of terrific line readings and crisp stage presences, but, particularly from Shalhoub, there's far too much meandering into mugging. Heaton, despite a single Act 1 scene and two in Act 2, gets Stella pitch-perfect, but Rebeck's script sabotages her effort: Stella barely gets a chance to confront Charlie at all, despite his desertion of her.
Welch, as in his many prior stage performances, proves a very fine stage actor. This is even more pronounced given that Lewis is really a dramatic device enabling Charlie to ruin his life with Stella, and again a facile tool when Stella is romantically linked to him in the end. Yet the actor plays it good-humoredly, and he finds surprising moments of cleverness. When an audience member at the performance I attended blurted out "That's funny" during one amusing scene, Welch demonstrated the value of the well-placed comic pause.
And then there's Camp, whose performance is anything but. Indeed, for Clea, a real bombshell of bloviation, Rebeck has written several quite windy speeches, and Camp attacks them eagerly. Relentless as Clea is, Camp makes her equally, though improbably, charming. She could try modulating her inflections, but, like, why would she do that?
Presented by and at Second Stage Theatre,
307 W. 43rd St., NYC.
Jan. 11-Feb. 11. Tue., 7 p.m.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Wed. and Sat., 2 p.m.; Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 246-4422 or www.secondstagetheatre.com.
Casting by Tara Rubin Casting.