The jokes are as creaky as the characters in the old-folks play Grand Horizons.
The jokes are as creaky as the characters in the old-folks play Grand Horizons.
B roadway’s Grand Horizons could have been titled Not Particularly. A not-particularly-engaging elderly couple has a not-particularly-compelling two-hour quarrel expressed in not-particularly-funny one-liners. Do I recommend it? Not particularly.
The play by Bess Wohl (at the Helen Hayes Theater through March 1) has been compared to the work of Neil Simon, but Neil Simon, though he was too fond of stagey contrivance and too often content to glide above the surface of his situations, was a master of comedy. A Broadway theater on West 52nd Street is named after him. Wohl, on the other hand, writes weak gestures in the direction of comedy, thin one-liners that fall into dusty silos like “inappropriate sexual reference.” It was 15 minutes before the show ended when I laughed for the first time: A self-important high school drama teacher who has huffily reminded us that he has 200 charges who look up to him is told, “200 kids is way too much for The Crucible.”
The play is set in a retirement community where Nancy (Jane Alexander) and Bill (James Cromwell), who have been married for 50 years, live in amiable silence. At least that’s how it appears; the only two lines of dialogue in the opening scene are “I think I would like a divorce” (she) and “All right” (he). The drama teacher, Brian (Michael Urie) is the couple’s son; their other child, Ben (Ben McKenzie) is expecting a baby with his therapist wife, Jess (Ashley Park). The boys get flustered for no particular reason as their parents calmly outline their plans for splitting up. There is no plot to speak of, merely a situation for everyone to chew over for two hours. At one point Cromwell breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience for a couple of minutes; at another, Jess has a mini-breakdown that isn’t really connected to anything and is of no consequence. Such filler exists merely to plump up the proceedings a bit to the size of a play.
As directed by Leigh Silverman on an antiseptic, garishly lit set that looks exactly like a “unit” in a retirement community full of identical mini-homes, the play rarely provides a sense that there are stakes, that anything much matters. Do we really care if these two cranky old people go their separate ways? Will their grown children really have much difficulty adjusting to the new reality? As if to emphasize the general lack of dramatic oomph, three of the performers behave like graduates of the wave-your-fingers-hysterically-in-the-air school of acting. Cromwell at least is a pro, providing some minimal level of appeal to the grouchy old La-Z-Boy occupant he plays. “We each had a very happy 20 years,” says Bill. “After that, we met.” When his wife tells him, “I hope you die a miserable death,” his reply is, “So you’re asking me to come back.” This is the level of banter, familiar from a thousand grumpy-oldsters shows of the past, that characterizes the entire play.
Alexander, who stumbled over her lines at the performance I attended, wafts through the play without really getting in touch with the essence of her character, who is damaged by the sense that she could have had a happier life with a high school boyfriend with whom she secretly had an adulterous fling. The other actors have no impact whatsoever with the exception of Priscilla Lopez, who pops in for one lively scene as Bill’s secret girlfriend, Carla, with whom he has been exchanging naughty phone messages and whom the wife adores because she promises to remove Bill from the house once and for all.
Wohl is at her best in the dramatic interludes, when she drops the attempt to be zippy and simply lets her characters expand on the grueling realities of late life. A far more incisive play on the same topic, Harry Townsend’s Last Stand, is playing off-Broadway a few blocks north at City Center, but at times Grand Horizons matches its poignance and sensitivity in the second act. Carla tells a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s who leaves treats and notes in front of the mirror because she thinks the lady she sees there is a different person, trapped in two dimensions, and hence in need of a few gestures of kindness. That’s the kind of detail that feels agonizingly true to life, but there aren’t enough of them to make Grand Horizons worth your time.