A Brutal Honesty

There are two Michael Weller plays currently up in New York, "Fifty Words" at the Lucille Lortel Theater and "Beast" at NY Theater Workshop. Both are brutal. "Fifty Words" is finished, polished, perfected. "Beast" has a kernel of something very authentic, but it isn't there yet, and getting there is painful.

Comedy, in order to be truly funny, requires truth. "Fifty Words," referring to the fifty words Eskimos have for snow, is so close to what marriage really is that the laughter occasionally erupting from an uncomfortable audience is the recognition of truth. "Fifty Words" is a hyper-realistic examination of a modern marriage--a couple who met years before in a chance sexual encounter, both with careers, a child, a child who is having difficulties, the wife trying to jump start a new career after years at home playing mother. The dialogue between the husband and wife is hyper-real, because everything they say to each other is what any married person secretly thinks or maybe should be saying, but rarely does. "Fifty Words" has no intermission, although it is broken into three acts. I suspect that people would run out of the theater if they had the chance. By keeping the audience in their seats, the play hits home. It's there for another month, and I recommend it so long as your marriage can withstand the scrutiny.

"Fifty Words" is riveting. Impeccably directed by Austin Pendleton, and with performances that keep the audience on the edge by Elizabeth Marvel and Norbert Leo Butz, both of whom display their professionalism, craft, and passion.

Michael Weller, the playwright, has an amazing command of the intimacy between husband and wife, and between comrades facing the horrors of war. "Beast" begins with a heartbreaking scene, a soliloquy by a private, disfigured from a firefight in Iraq, speaking to the casket of his sergeant, killed in that same battle. There is such potential nestled in this play, but it doesn't make it yet. The first act has startling moments of truth, and then veers off into a graphic novel sense of absurdity. The performance by Logan Marshall-Green as Jimmy Cato is volatile and mesmerizing. But the problem with "Beast" is the script, which was only recently written and workshopped. It's still a work in progress. It has something to say about war, especially about Iraq and George Bush, but it's not yet ripened.

Actually, my husband who saw combat, couldn't sit through the second act. I managed to remain, along with our friends Stu (who served as a military doctor in Viet Nam during the Tet Offensive) and Ginger, but there wasn't much in the second act to keep us there, and to keep Jordan waiting for us in the lobby.