After being assaulted by Simon Mendes da Costa’s
Losing Louie for two relentless acts, I had a vision of Manhattan Theatre Club subscribers massing in front of the Biltmore, shouting for their money back while wielding signs reading “Phooey on Louie” and “Louie Is a Loser.” Indeed, for much of the comedy — which was first performed at London’s Hampstead Theater in January 2005 — I thought there was no excuse whatsoever for it being presented by any reputable company. But during the work’s final stretch, and I do mean “s-t-r-e-e-e-e-t-c-h,” a partial reconciliation occurs between two long-estranged brothers that the MTC powers-that-be must have believed gives the piece a touch of gravitas. Sadly, it’s a case of too little too late.
Set both in the early 1960s and the present day, Losing Louie begins with a new sex-comedy cliché: a couple in bed having the kind of relatively graphic sex that includes frenzied activity both Up There and Down There. Making whoopee are lawyer Louie Ellis (Scott Cohen) and Bella Holland (Jama Williamson), a young law student who’s boarding with Louie, his wife Bobbie (Rebecca Creskoff), and their six-year-old son Tony. How the adulterous event affects the grown-up Tony (Mark Linn-Baker) 44 years later is the play’s major concern. The “losing” of the title, meanwhile, refers to Louie’s death; the present-day part of the play is set on the day of his funeral, as Tony reunites with his more successful, younger brother Reggie (Matthew Arkin). Also on hand for the sad event are the feuding siblings’ wives, Sheila (Michele Pawk) and Elizabeth (Patricia Kalember), who get to spout a good percentage of the witless lines that Mendes da Costa doles out in messy profusion.
Perhaps the MTC folks thought the dramedy’s structure — in which Louie, Bella, and Bobbie alternate loud scenes with the next generation on the same set, a spacious blue-and-white bedroom by John Lee Beatty — confers quality on the script. If so, they’ve woefully miscalculated. Each time one brace of characters exits, another pair or more enters, and the contrivances the playwright has dreamed up to get these peregrinations underway are not to be believed.
It’s not always a mistake to craft a play with scenes set in different time periods, the point of which is to outline how the lies and secrets of one generation impinge on succeeding generations. Actually, this can be a strong concept, as Richard Greenberg proved in Three Days of Rain. But Losing Louie, which proudly dispenses references to Secaucus and small-penis jokes for humor, and relies on acrimonious exchanges for drama, doesn’t measure up to that prior MTC triumph in any way.
Condolences on this solemn occasion not to the fictional Ellis family but to the very real actors assigned to portray them and theirs. These talented folks have done respectable work previously, so you can’t blame them for the script problems they’re up against here. At times, they even lift the proceedings. Arkin, as the womanizing Reggie, finds some humor in a man who has steam coming out of his ears. Baker draws on his puckish quality as someone more frustrated than frustrating. The always elegant Kalember projects wit even when she has nothing witty to say. Pawk makes her character’s crassness intermittently appealing. Cohen, Williamson, and Creskoff also wage the uphill battle with valor.
Director Jerry Zaks seems to have done as much as he could with the material. True, his work here is not on a level with his treatment of Six Degrees of Separation or even with last season’s Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, but it’s notches above his total misunderstanding of Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan some years back. Still, I sometimes wonder if Zaks turns down any project. As he should have learned by now, there is no great glory in being one of New York’s most prominent theater yes-men.