Good for Otto is a painfully stylized, windy parable.
Otto is a hamster whose owner is a friendly but mentally challenged middle-aged man who notes of his pet, “He smiles when he’s running on his treadmill like he’s going somewhere. But he’s not!”
Reader, aren’t you and I a bit like Otto? And isn’t that just too sad?
When you name your play after a hamster, you leave yourself open to certain charges, and David Rabe’s Good for Otto (through April 15 at New York’s Pershing Square Theater) is guilty of all of them. It’s precious, cutesy, cloying, shallow, maudlin, and boringly avant-garde. Derived from Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town, which was avant-garde avant la lettre and which has not aged especially well, Good for Otto stars Ed Harris as a kindly shrink in a New England town who is haunted by the memories of his dead mother, who committed suicide, and by the patients he failed to save (among them another suicide). He is fixated on saving his favorite patient, a disturbed 12-year-old girl named Frannie (Rileigh McDonald), from a similar fate.
The play alternates between hallucinatory episodes in which Harris’s Dr. Michaels indulges in imaginary conversations with the departed and scenes set in the now, often in the offices where Michaels and another psychiatrist (Amy Madigan) seek to talk their patients through their problems. Rabe would have us think he has created a cross-section of humanity, but what he has actually done is rummaged through the bin of stock theatrical types.
The hamster’s owner, Timothy (Mark Linn-Baker), is one of those impossibly gentle and childlike mental patients whose efforts to reach out to people are tragically inappropriate. He gets in trouble after following a woman around McDonald’s repeatedly saying hello to her.
A young man of college age (Maulik Pancholy) carries the following burden: He is gay. No, really, that’s it. He’s just gay. This is a problem in 2018? That isn’t even interesting in 2018. For playwrights of Rabe’s generation (the author of Streamers and Hurlyburly, he was born in 1940), I guess you can’t stop reaching back into the idea pantry for the old standbys. I’m surprised Rabe didn’t find room to throw in a few lines about how the Rosenbergs were innocent while he was at it.
What he has created is a painfully stylized, windy parable about the wells of sadness that lie deep, deep within us all. A large cast, seated on worn chairs distributed around the edges of the stage, step forward by turns to do what actors love most: deliver loony monologues. F. Murray Abraham plays an oldster who one day decided life was just too sad to get out of bed, so after a while he didn’t. For several weeks. A compulsive hoarder (Kenny Mellman) explains his urgent need to keep files of everything he reads. One fellow (Michael Rabe, the playwright’s son) relates how an ordinary quiet evening at home took a turn for the messy when he remembered he had a shotgun in the corner that demanded to be aimed into his forehead: “It was almost like it spoke.” If the walls of the theater hosting Good for Otto could speak, they’d say, “We could write better dialogue than this.”
Dr. Michaels’s beautiful mother (Charlotte Hope), who took her life when she was 30 and hence remains stuck at that age, 34 years younger than her son, begins the play seated in the audience and intermittently wafts up and down and around the stage bedeviling Dr. Michaels, sort of like Stevie Nicks, only she coats everything with a fug of tragedy instead of witchy magic. All of these shards of memory and regret and loss are set apart by cornball theatrical breaks such as having a stage manager fire a starter pistol or ordering the cast to file glumly around in figure 8s under low lights.
The sadness! The humanity!
The sadness! The humanity! If it weren’t for all of the name-brand actors on stage, you’d swear you were in an undergraduate playwrights’ workshop production over in a basement at the Liberal Arts College for the Pretentious Yet Dim. As Rabe scribbled one unconvincing thumbnail of depression and neurosis after another, I was reminded of how much snappier other artists have been when going about the same goal: Billy Joel wrapped up “Piano Man” in under six minutes, and the Beatles tore through “Eleanor Rigby” in only 2:08. Rabe’s play runs three hours.
The theater was half-empty for the second act. Lucky them, they didn’t have to hear lines like, “So it rises, the black, black tar, sticky and heavy over everything,” or, “It’s just so impossible — reality.”