Disconnect

There are many lessons to be learned from going to the theater, such as: Be very careful when people you barely know invite you to their home. The dinner party in Rob Ackerman’s Disconnect isn’t quite as harrowing — or as long and alcohol-soaked — as George and Martha’s after-hours get-together in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but the evening still ends up being no one’s idea of a good time. Sadly, the same can be said about this ridiculously overstuffed, awkwardly structured drama.

Ackerman, the author of the hit play Tabletop, has borrowed a couple of pages from the Albee playbook, which would be fine if he shared the master’s finesse. The year is 1998 and Steve has just met Jane in the park that morning — their kids ended up playing together — so he decides to throw an impromptu dinner party at his modern art-filled Upper West Side apartment. (The Zabar’s bag placed on the floor by set designer James Youmans is a nice touch!). He half-jokingly tells his wife Patty, a marketing executive turned stay-at-home mom, that they need to make friends with a couple both of whom they like, but she’s skeptical about his motives.

Once the guests arrive, we quickly discover that — much like Nick and Honey in Virginia Woolf — they also have a less-than-ideal marriage. Indeed, they are currently in the midst of a crisis. Jane, a certified social worker, a paraprofessional psychic, and a witch (in both senses of the word), is still reeling from the fact that the seemingly good-natured Fred, a Wall Street Journal reporter, has slapped their young son Tommy. (This may be the sins-of-the-father result of Fred having been beaten senseless as a young man by his dad, a respected Boston businessman.)

Also as in Virginia Woolf, there’s a devastating secret that we’re teased about from the get-go but isn’t revealed until the last scene. Steve, a highly successful corporate consultant, has just returned from a trip to Chicago, where he’s made an important marketing presentation to his top client — a communications company called Teletrax — and reconnected with his clinically depressed childhood friend Artie. While he insists that both visits went well, it’s clear from the outset of the play that he’s lying on one or more counts. Not only is he obviously on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but his “conversations” with the specter of Artie belie his words. The truth eventually comes out, none too convincingly, and it’s not pretty.

To his credit, Ackerman has a lot on his mind — everything from analyzing our over-reliance on technology and under-reliance on honest communication to the reason why Paul McCartney’s vocal on “Oh! Darlin'” is his all-time best to a clever if overly complex recipe for cold sesame noodles. The playwright is certainly capable of sharp characterizations and pithy aphorisms; I particularly like Artie’s statement that “an object goes from elegant to useful to neglected to obsolete to memory”. But the sum of these parts is a lot of frustration.

Ackerman doesn’t get much assistance in delineating the play’s strengths from director Connie Grappo, who nonetheless handles the cast with some assurance. Matthew Boston manages to make Steve relatively sympathetic even in his least likeable moments; Elizabeth Connors convinces us that Patty, a somewhat thankless role, is probably the smartest and sanest person in the room; and Lou Sumrall gives dimension to both Artie and Peter Hamish, Teletrax’s boorish head honcho. The very fine Brennan Brown’s slight goofiness as Fred lends the proceedings some much-needed lightness; my major quibble is that his Fred seems like a guy from New Jersey rather than a Boston Brahmin.

But it’s Benko — last seen on this stage in the CSC production of The False Servant — who takes the night’s top honors. Her drier-than-vermouth delivery of Jane’s put-downs and her Spanish Inquisition-meets-Oprah-like manner of asking questions are instantly recognizable to anyone who’s ever met a social worker, a witch, or even an Upper West Sider. Indeed, if Edward Albee is already thinking ahead to a 60th-anniversary revival of Virginia Woolf, he should consider Benko for the role of Martha.