Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: I think there’s a difference between being a review and being a critic.

A reviewer gives you advice on what to see. And at a time when ticket prices are higher than ever, it’s good to have people whose advice you trust suggesting what to buy tickets for and what you can ignore without feeling deprived. But a reviewer’s advice is useless once you’ve seen the show in question.

A critic should offer a provocative discussion of the work in question. A genuine piece of criticism doesn’t have to agree with your opinion to be worth reading. I’ve read pieces critical of work I love and pieces that praise work I don’t care for and still found value in them. (I disagreed a lot with Pauline Kael.)

I am trying to lean more to the critical than the reviewer side. I don’t write about everything. For one thing, as I’m on the Tony nominating committee for three years, I am proscribed against expressing any opinion about new Broadway shows, so I concentrate on off and off-off-Broadway. And I prefer to write when I have something to say that hasn’t already been covered very well by other writers.

My problem, discussing Well, I’ll Let You Go by Bubba Weiler is that, in order to discuss it critically, I would have to blow some of the surprises you should have the pleasure of experiencing. I wanted to brain the people who blabbed the way David Cromer staged the third act of his remarkable production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.

Some have referenced Our Town discussing Well, I’ll Let You Go, and the comparison is fair. Weiler’s play has an all-knowing narrator and the stage starts off as bare as a traditional production of Our Town. Both plays also reveal a good deal about the inner workings of a small town.

The towns are different. Whereas Grover’s Corners is a small, warm enclosed community surrounded by the beauty of the New England countryside at the beginning of the 20th Century, Weiler’s play is set in “a medium-sized town in the Midwest” today. Despite the difference in the topography and the technology to which the characters have access, the interweave of personal relationships within a community is what both plays are about.

The central character is Maggie. Her longtime husband, Marv, has just died, and she is trying to make sense not only of his death but of their life together. A series of characters come into the house that she shared with him. (The house is not realistically represented. What we see onstage is stuff you would find in a rehearsal hall. In a production note, Weiler writes, “anything described in speech should not be literally visible.”) Clearly, Maggie knows more about Marv that we in the audience do, but each new character who enters brings new insight for both her and us. Weiler handles the revelations with the craft of a veteran mystery novelist, but it’s to his great credit that I never felt manipulated.

To some degree, the play is about the different faces a character shows different people. Maggie lived with Marv for decades and of course knows a great deal about him, but inevitably people don’t show all of their aspects to anyone. I remember when Wendy and the Lost Boys, Julie Salamon’s biography of Wendy Wasserstein, was released. I ran into Chris Durang on the street and asked him what he thought of it. Wendy and Chris had been close friends for decades, since their days at Yale. He told me that he was surprised by how much he hadn’t known about her, adding, “I didn’t realize how much she compartmentalized.” Some people compartmentalize intentionally (bigamists, for instance). Most of us compartmentalize to some degree unwittingly. I won’t describe what Maggie learns because that would damage your experience of the play. (I do hope you’ll see the play.) But what she learns is significant.

As she learns more and the picture of Marv is filled in, director Jack Serio fills in more of the stage. And I’m going to shut up now for fear of writing too much. Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays Maggie and Matthew Maher fills us in on what we need to know when we need to know it. The rest of the strong ensemble includes Cricket Brown, Will Dagger, Emily Davis, Danny McCarthy, Constance Shulman, and Amelia Workman.

OK, I’ll say one thing more. I love plays that include transformations. This play includes a couple of beauts. It’s off-Broadway at Studio Seaview.