Nuanced direction brings out poignance in Greenberg's 'American Plan'

By: ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Wednesday, March 5, 2008 12:47 PM PST ∞

"Happiness exists. But it's for other people."

Imagine a mother singing that sentiment to her only child, and you'll begin to know the sorrow at the heart of Richard Greenberg's "The American Plan."

First produced by Manhattan Theater Club in 1990, this strange, wistful tragicomedy is only now getting its West Coast premiere in a sensitively directed staging by Kim Rubinstein at the Old Globe. Though the script is an odd mix of fairy tale, poetic realism and social satire, with a meandering second act, "The American Plan" explores themes that haunt Greenberg's later work and have made the prolific playwright such an important and distinctive contemporary voice.

In this early play, there's the bracing literate wit, the exploration of sexual and class roles, even the flashes of skin that made a populist hit of Greenberg's naked-boys baseball comedy, "Take Me Out" (2002). But there's also the deeper fascination with the legacy of parents, the fluidity of identity, and time ---- and its ravages --- that saturated "The Violet Hour" and "Three Days of Rain," both seen previously at the Globe.

And in Rubinstein's staging, "The American Plan" trembles with a melancholy that makes even the manipulative mother, Eva, who warped her daughter with that fearsome lullaby, almost understandable.

The year is 1960; the place, a lakeside facing a typically middle-class Jewish resort in the Catskills. Rubinstein and designer Wilson Chin open their production in the Cassius Carter Centre Stage with a splash ---- literally.

While a pretty, long-haired girl lolls about, a handsome stranger emerges bare-chested from the lake. Lili Adler, a Sarah Lawrence dropout, is Jewish, the fey daughter, we learn, of wealthy Eastern Europeans who got out just before the SS closed in. Lili's buff merman is Nick, the mysterious WASP son of a suburban Connecticut businessman.

For much of the action, Nick (Patrick Zeller) plays the gentleman caller, raising hopes that fragile, fanciful, yet fierce Lili (Kate Arrington) can escape the clutches of her controlling mother. Such resonances from "The Glass Menagerie" are textured with sharp observations about prejudice, assimilation and conformity. Certain of her cultural superiority, for instance, Eva views the middle-class Jews across the lake from her summer house as far beneath her ---- and Nick as a two-bit American dreamer whose lies she will expose so she can control him.

Throughout the first act, Sandra Shipley brings to Eva an alert, witchlike malevolence. She's as manipulative as the Mam in Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," though with a shrewd eloquence and smooth elegance that take the breath away. Shipley's erect posture, classy clothes, beautiful skin and blood-red nails create the image of a woman who equates superior grooming with superior morals.

The lovely chime of her thickly accented voice and the gracious openness of her manners are a culturally determined mask, though now and again Shipley can briefly seduce even the audience into believing that this angry, widowed Holocaust victim-turned-victimizer may have her troubled daughter's best interests at heart.

Arrington, the Chicago actor who made a strong impression at the Globe with her comic skill in "Hold, Please," here creates a bizarrely complicated, mood-swinging beauty who throws herself at Nick and at the possibility of love with authentic passion. We're never quite sure how crazy she is, or for that matter, how honest he is being in his intensifying desire for her.

Though Zeller doesn't look right for the romantic aspects of the part, he's potent and moving when Eva unmasks Nick's denials about his father, his profession and his sexual confusion. Zeller projects that ambivalence even more forcefully in scenes with a former love who has tracked him to this mountain hideaway.

None of these characters, seen at the end of the Eisenhower era before the upheavals of the next decade, fits precisely into anyone's "American Plan." Each struggles between keeping up appearances and breaking free.

Greenberg complicates their dynamic too much in the second act; the action becomes long and discursive, leapfrogging through improbable machinations as Eva spins the web of deceptions designed to trap the three youngsters like so much prey.

These scenes introduce a relaxed young actor of exceptional promise, Michael Kirby. He plays Nick's friend Gil Harbison as a true WASP, blond and seemingly bland, and sucked in by the blandishments of Eva, who conspires to use his desires for their mutual nefarious purposes.

Watching all this with a kind of sardonic resignation is Olivia (Sharon Hope), the Adler family's black maid. She's a kind of retainer who serves the tea, but then also sits down to sip it, while playing sounding board to Eva and spy (or better mother?) to Lili.

The final scene ---- beautifully staged in a pool of light and movingly enacted by Arrington and Zeller ---- occurs 10 years later, when Nick arrives, hoping for a kind of absolution. Time never brings-happily-ever-after endings to Greenberg characters, however. Instead, in the moment when Lili acknowledges her passion and pain, Nick must confront his failure to build anything vaguely resembling a satisfactory life.

In this brief coda, Arrington's lost Lili flickers free for a moment, before extinguishing herself in her mother's shadow. The final scene redirects the play inward after too many bumpy second-act detours. In the production's heartbreaking final image, this once-upon-a-time prince and princess stand face to face, mournfully mute, each knowing full well that happiness exists, but only for "other people."

"The American Plan"

When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through March 30

Where: Cassius Carter Centre Stage, Old Globe Theatre complex, Balboa Park, San Diego

Tickets: $42-$59

Info: (619) 234-5623

Web: www.theoldglobe.org

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