A Naked Girl on the Appian Way
and Matthew Morrison in A Naked Girl on the Appian Way
(Photo © Joan Marcus)
When you come to think of it, a great many plays are about dysfunctional families. Start with Oedipus, work your way through Hamlet and King Lear, then move on to Long Day’s Journey Into Night, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman. So it ought to be refreshing to happen on Richard Greenberg’s A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, which concerns a functional family. What a concept!
Unfortunately, dysfunction is evident in the play itself, a mind-boggling blunder by a dramatist who was done out of the Pulitzer Prize for his Take Me Out only a few years ago and whose superlative Three Days of Rain will arrive on Broadway later this season with Julia Roberts starring. Although Naked Girl is set in “some Hampton” — where, if I remember correctly, part of his early effort Eastern Standard took place — nothing in his previous work will have prepared you for the frequently vulgar and arch exchanges among two-dimensional characters that run through this play like hooligans on a bender.
You might call A Naked Girl on the Appian Way a sitcom, since its premise sounds like the sort of one-paragraph pitch that a boob-tube writer would confidently throw at network executives. (The play even features an Estelle Getty-like character who regularly speaks her mind in potty-mouth style.) But this would be an insult to the best sitcoms that television now offers, such as The Office and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Okay, you might say that Greenberg’s unfunny comedy is reminiscent of something that NBC would try out in desperation and then pull after four episodes.
Certainly, the family in Naked Girl more than faintly resembles the kind of off-beat aggregate that television execs think is appealing to the masses. Social theorist/writer Jeffrey Lapin (Richard Thomas) and his wife, cookbook author Bess (Jill Clayburgh), are expecting two of their children home from Europe. When Juliet (Susan Kelechi Watson) and Thad (Matthew Morrison), return all atwitter from their 17-month stay abroad, they have a piece of news that serves to throw the household into turmoil — particularly the third sibling, Bill (James Yaegashi). Also causing disruptions on this monumental day are next-door neighbors Elaine (Leslie Ayvazian) and her feisty old ex-mother-in-law Sadie (Ann Guilbert), both of whom have yappers that would stun sailors.
To say much more about the plot is difficult, since Greenberg clearly wants his string of lame developments to be gasp-worthy surprises, so reading more of this paragraph could mean encountering plot spoilers. First, although the sibs have grown up under the same roof, they have disparate backgrounds. Before Greenberg lets this crowd off the hook, he inserts possible incest and actual lesbianism into the kind of flat soufflé that Bess Lapin would never allow to be whipped up in her pristine kitchen.
By my count there are five genuine chuckles in this intermissionless play. (There are three distinct scenes; possibly, Greenberg wrote the piece as a three-act offering but management subtracted the intervals so patrons would be discouraged from fleeing early.) None of these solid jokes will be previewed here, since the cast deserves the few rewards they’re trying for — sometimes trying too hard.
Thomas — late of the Central Park As You Like It where he huffed and puffed as Touchstone — is still working himself red in the face. Clayburgh, having little to do but look well-heeled in the casual outfit that Catherine Zuber has provided and well-housed in a stunning but antiseptic John Lee Beatty showplace, seems to be merely marking time until she visits a smaller abode as the mom in the upcoming revival of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park. As for the youngsters: Morrison is rambunctious as the sweet-tempered and athletic Thad, Watson is bright-eyed and down-to-earth as Juliet, and Yaegashi is resolutely taciturn as Bill. Seizing the Estelle Getty part, Guilbert is as obscene as the script requires; so is Ayvazian, the real point of her role only becoming clear very late in the play.
Although the actors acquit themselves with some aplomb, director Doug Hughes could probably have done more than he has to make the play work, such as toning down some of the (compensatory?) bombast and enlivening some of the earlier moments in Greenberg’s peek at the metaphorical cracks in this Hamptons home. But maybe the best thing to do is to simply forget about A Naked Girl on the Appian Way (and definitely forget about the relevance of the title to the action). Let’s wipe the slate clean for Greenberg and Hughes, who will reunite in the spring for A House in Town at Lincoln Center. With men as accomplished as these two, there’s every reason to believe that the new show will be as exhilarating as Naked Girl is dire.
