Clean Living

Satire of a very high order is playing at 59E59 in the form of Brian Dykstra’s Clean Alternatives. This three-person play is sharp, incisive theater as well searing political commentary. If Dykstra climbs on top of a soapbox from time-to-time, you’ll readily forgive it, because even those speeches feature a caliber of oratory that we don’t hear often enough.

The story revolves around two silver-tongued, amoral lawyers who work for big business; they are negotiating a very strange but alluring deal with the female owner of a virtually bankrupt company. A wonderful combination of language, ideas, and even a bit of unexpected romance lights a fire under the play. The beauty of it is that you never know where it’s going. With each turn of the plot and with each revelation of character, the audience becomes more intoxicated with Dykstra’s talent for tale-spinning.

All three cast members — the author, Mark Boyett, and Sue-Anne Morrow — bring many things to the table. The bottom line is that all of them read as whip-smart, which is essential to the piece. Margaret Perry wisely directs the production with simplicity, putting the focus on the actors rather than the staging. This show is a worthy alternative to some of the more disappointing fare to be found elsewhere around town.

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Barefoot Doesn’t Bear Re-Peeting

Director Scott Elliott got everything right in his revival of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, except the most essential element: He made the mistake of casting Amanda Peet as Corie. We need to find the character adorable in order to understand why everyone else in the play — particularly her husband, Paul (Patrick Wilson) — is willing to put up with her. As played by Peet, she’s a pretty but spoiled young woman who shouts. Worse yet, Peet shouts because she can’t project her dialogue the way the other actors can. The result is that Corie seems boorish on top of being spoiled.

Barefoot derives a good deal of its humor from jokes about climbing endless flights of stairs in a walkup apartment building. Once you get past that tired gag, there is the equally tired construct of the free-spirited young woman who helps the stuffed shirt young man loosen up and enjoy life. But when the stuffed shirt is more appealing than the free spirit, the play is in trouble. Indeed, Wilson gives a pitch-perfect performance, while Jill Clayburgh and Tony Roberts are solid as Corie’s mom and Victor Velasco. Adam Seitz, as a telephone repairman, gets to steal a couple of scenes. In other words, there’s good casting everywhere except where it was needed most.

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Right People, Wrong Play

Charles Grodin is too intelligent and talented to write a truly bad play. And Primary Stages, where Grodin’s The Right Kind of People is currently playing, is too savvy a company to present worthless work. But this social comedy, set in the spider web of a Fifth Avenue co-op board, probably read better on paper than it plays on the stage.

The premise is that people reveal their true character in protected environments such as a co-op board, and the personalities they display are often not pretty to behold. Here, we see all sorts of insidious prejudices expressed, often obliquely but nonetheless with life-changing effects. Racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, ageism — just about every ism with a bad connotation — rears its head in Grodin’s play. His socio-political points are well-taken but his themes are delivered at the expense of a thin narrative, and the characters generally exist as types rather than three-dimensional human beings. Moreover, much of what happens in the plot is told to us rather than shown. There may be the right kind of people onstage for an incisive comedy, but they’re in the wrong vehicle.

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[To contact the Siegels directly, e-mail them at siegels@theatermania.com.]