Hotmail
NEW YORK (AP) -- "I know a lot of people say we're crazy," says a member of the acting profession in "The Understudy," a backstage comedy about oh-so-insecure thespians. Well, yes. They're actors.
Crazy and more than a little desperate, according to playwright Theresa Rebeck, who has concocted a frantic tale set against the backdrop of an understudy rehearsal for a big Broadway hit, a three-hour-plus adaptation of Kafka. Kafka on Broadway? A commercial success? Even Mikhail Baryshnikov couldn't turn Kafka's "Metamorphosis" into a hit 20 years ago on Broadway.
Right away we know Rebeck is dabbling in fantasy in her satiric little trifle, which the Roundabout Theatre Company opened Thursday at its Laura Pels Theatre off-Broadway.
The play is slight and not as funny as it should be. Please, no more Jeremy Piven-mercury poisoning jokes, for one thing. Yet director Scott Ellis has marshaled his ingratiating cast — Julie White, Justin Kirk and Mark-Paul Gosselaar — well. And they are a game group, giving spirited performances in this brisk 90 minutes of often noisy confrontation.
Harry, played by Kirk, is a bitter, perennially underemployed performer now understudying Jake, portrayed by Gosselaar, an action-movie hero who somehow has found his way to Broadway. The young man is awed to be in the presence of art. The man genuflects to culture, even though he's a film star whose most recent flick — filled with the obligatory explosions and a rising body count — grossed $67 million its opening weekend.
It's a genial performance, full of sweet-tempered admiration for the theater and his responsibility to do the best he can for Kafka. Kirk has a harder time of it. Harry is a whiner, and whiners are not fun people, particularly when this one is dealing with a harried stage manager named Roxanne, played by the delightfully sardonic White.
Roxanne is more than harried. She's angry at Harry for having jilted her years ago — and leaving without any explanation. One of the odd things about "The Understudy" is that its best, or at least its most affecting moments, occur during the Roxanne-Harry confrontation scene when Harry, not big on saying he's sorry, tries to do just that. It's a lovely moment of genuine emotion in a play that has very few of them.
Much of the rest of the play feels over-contrived. From the unseen and perpetually stoned stage assistant who is working the lights during the rehearsal to an odd plot point — in which Gosselaar's character is also an understudy — to the Kafka play's other big star, an even more celebrated film icon.
In between, Rebeck spoofs Kafka with several snippets from that supposed big Broadway hit. The paranoia is similar to what the actors are going through in their own lives. Too bad their offstage insecurities only prove to be fitfully entertaining.
