Underneath the Lintel, a detective story in the form of a play, packed the 375-seat George Street Playhouse during its four-performance opening weekend. Just goes to show that people love a good story, especially when it starts with a library book being returned 113 years overdue.
Director Maria Mileaf's casting of Richard Schiff, the Emmy-winning actor who plays Toby Ziegler on TV's The West Wing, in the role of the Librarian certainly generated interest in this solo 90-minute show. But you wouldn't know his pedigree from the program: Schiff's biography says only, "For my friend, John Spencer," his West Wing co-star, who died suddenly last December.
The playwright, Glen Berger, has a habit of offering arcane information, the sort of minutiae most of us would rather not know. As he notes in the afterword to the printed version of the play, "More living creatures are in my stomach and yours at this moment than the total number of human beings that have ever existed." Ugh.
Yet the compulsion to mine a subject no one else pays any attention to is what drives Berger's Librarian to seek the elusive "A," the man who checked out a travel guide from a Dutch library in 1873 and gave as his address a post office box in China. As the play proceeds, a closer examination of the book reveals a 1913 claim ticket for a pair of trousers from a Chinese laundry in London. The Librarian, who has never left his native Holland, feels compelled to travel to London to retrieve them. In the pocket of the trousers is a 1912 tram ticket for Bonn, which leads to more information, including the story of a "dirty Jew" who refused to sit down on the tram and had a dog. As the Librarian says at this point, "Interesting. Not riveting. But interesting." Which pretty much sums up the play.
Schiff gives an excellent performance, tossing off Berger's comments and observations, which result in frequent laughter. His character's passion for solving the mystery is palpable. His accent, clothes, and attitude draw us into a world that becomes increasingly more bizarre as he tracks down clues on different continents. Then, quite suddenly, the story shifts from finding "A" to the Librarian finding himself, after he is fired and his employment record is expunged. He needs to prove, as the play puts it, that "I was here." But unlike Mr. A., the Librarian has a finite amount of time. He becomes increasingly more desperate. We begin to wonder if he is losing his grip on reality or if he lost it soon after he began his timeless, endless quest.
The set (by Neil Patel) is a rented lecture hall the Librarian enters with the house lights still on, carrying a suitcase he calls "a box of scraps...significant scraps." He pulls out various pieces of evidence to prove his case. And very slowly, he sounds more and more convincing. When the play shifts gears from relaxed storytelling mode to frenetic philosophical treatise, it is quite jarring, as if Berger were in a hurry to meet some 90-minute deadline. But as Schiff sails through the play's final minutes, he has no doubt left an impression. One wonders what different conclusions Sherlock Holmes might have arrived at with similarly improbable clues.
Underneath the Lintel runs Jan. 10–Feb. 5 at the George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, N.J. Tickets: (732) 246-7717. Website: www.georgestplayhouse.org.