Manuscript

Paul Grellong’s Manuscript seems like the type of play that’s designed to reach out to younger audiences: The characters are three young, ambitious, sarcastic college students who talk about sex and drugs, and the script is filled with contemporary references from animé to professional wrestling. But without a halfway credible plot or fully developed characters, there’s just not enough here to satisfy theatergoers of any age.

Home in Brooklyn on Christmas vacation from Harvard, budding novelist David (Pablo Schreiber) is hanging out with his childhood friend Chris (Jeffrey Carlson). They are joined by Chris’s new girlfriend, Elizabeth (Marin Ireland), whose first published novel was a best-seller. It turns out that Elizabeth has a secret, as does everyone else in the play. The characters’ backgrounds begin to come to the forefront when Chris apparently discovers an unpublished manuscript by a famous writer and the three of them discuss whether or not they should appropriate it.

If I came across an early draft of this play, I wouldn’t even bother trying to steal it; there are so many unlikely twists in the narrative that the audience winds up feeling defrauded. (I’ll spare you the spoilers.) And even if one could suspend disbelief long enough to swallow the plot, all of the characters are cardboard cutouts: David’s a self-deprecating Jew, Chris is a privileged WASP, and Elizabeth is a self-serving bitch who’s willing to cheat or sleep her way to the top. It’s disappointing that Grellong can’t imagine these people outside of such narrow ethnic and gender roles.

However, he does have an ear for snappy dialogue, which is delivered skillfully by the cast. Schreiber plays David with self-assurance and sharp humor, while Carlson is hilarious as the preppy kid with the Brahmin accent. And though Ireland falls short in the more dramatic scenes, she holds her own when bantering with the boys. Bob Balaban’s direction is light and quick.

David Swayze’s scenic design is excellent; it’s as if he had physically taken a college student’s bedroom and carted it into the theater, complete with scattered bookshelf, assorted posters, action figures, and various items strewn around with a strangely meticulous disorder. Sara Tosetti’s costume design captures the characters well, and David Weiner’s lighting is properly naturalistic.

In one of the play’s more memorable scenes, David talks about how professional wrestling is so entertaining that audiences don’t mind the action being fake. Realistic theater can operate in a similar way, but Manuscript never rises to that level.