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[THEATER REVIEW] A Nervous Smile at WTF
7.28.06
WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL
A Nervous Smile by John Belluso
The Nikos Stage
July 26-August 6
Directed by Maria Mileaf
Reviewed by Chris Newbound, BERKSHIRE LIVING
The reason for the title being A Nervous Smile remains quite elusive until the very end of the play, though one doesn’t have to wait terribly long to learn it. At around eighty minutes, without intermission, A Nervous Smile by the late John Belluso (after being confined to a wheelchair himself for most of his life, the playwright sadly died at 36) feels somewhere between a full-length and one-act play, not completely sure what it wants to be quite yet. Divided into three scenes, the comedy-drama (with more of an emphasis on drama) all takes place in the fabulous New York apartment—terrific set design by Vince Mountain—of the unhappily married Brian and Eileen, played by Scott Cohen and Amy Brenneman. (Brenneman is perhaps best known for her starring role in the television series Judging Amy.)
As the play opens, the couple, somewhere in their late thirties, early forties, are returning to the apartment from a funeral of some sort, accompanied by their old friend Nicole, played by Gloria Reuben. Through their punchy hilarity (they’ve obviously been on the road for sometime and have stopped off for drinks), we learn that the funeral was for a child of some friends of theirs, a child with cerebral palsy. We also learn, slowly, that Brian, a struggling novelist/professor and Eileen, a wealthy, but unstable mother and wife, have a teenage daughter who is severely handicapped as well, as is Nicole’s eighteen-year-old son. All have apparently come to know each other through their long attendance (and mutual suffering) at somber parent support groups over the years. As soon as Eileen leaves the room to make some coffee, we also discover that Nicole and Brian are in the middle of a long-standing love affair that Eileen may or may not know about—neither has told her. A plan, however, has presumably been hatched between Brian and Eileen that involves Nicole: all of them will abandon their children in order to take off for new, unencumbered lives—Brian with Nicole to live simply in Buenos Aires, and Eileen to petty much have the life she now lives, minus husband and child, in London. Brian will get ten million of Eileen’s money to set out with; Nicole will leave her son with his father (the couple is divorced); and Brian and Eileen will take their daughter Emily to an Emergency Room and leave her there with a key to a safe deposit box where whoever is willing will find two million dollars to care for their child.
Incredibly, the threesome decide to go through with this plan, and perhaps even more absurdly, decides to follow through with it on that very same night. Despite this somewhat unbelievable premise, the realism of the play and the playwright’s well-drawn characterizations of the three principle leads, lulls one into going along with all of this as well despite our better judgment. Complications and a few second thoughts do occur when the caregiver for Brian and Eileen’s daughter, Blanka (a Russian immigrant with a taste for Vodka and Dostoyevsky, played colorfully by Deirdre O’Connell), reveals that she’s on to them, but the couple manages to buy her complicity and silence with a check for ten thousand dollars. Not before, however, Blanka has also revealed to Nicole that the afflicted Emily actually writes poetry and can understand Dostoyevsky with the aid of recent technological advances. She cannot always express the words, thoughts, and feelings that are inside her, but they are there all the same.
The final scene of the play is sometime later (weeks, perhaps?) where we find out the results of this morally dubious plan. To avoid ruining the ending, I will only say that the very end of the play has Blanka playing recordings of Emily’s poetry: a computer neutral voice slowly turns into that of a real teenage girl’s voice, whom among other things, compares her affliction to that of “A Nervous Smile.”
There’s much to pick apart about this play. And no doubt critics will. But there’s also much to recommend it, and is every bit as worth seeing as the much overrated Coastal Disturbances by Tina Howe, for instance, which is getting a-better-than-it-probably-deserves production at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. While there’s something about A Nervous Smile that still feels a little unfinished, even in its present state, and despite the subject matter, it’s very funny in a similar way as its very famous predecessor A Day in the Life of Joe Egg by Peter Nichols was in dealing with the same basic subject matter. And the performance by Amy Brenneman as the very flawed Eileen is a tour de force, worth the price of admission as they say. One rarely sees an actress so at ease on a live stage, so naturally embody the character she is playing as to allow audience members to completely forget they’re watching a play, that they’re in a theater watching an actress playing a part. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for Scott Cohen and Gloria Reuben. The chemistry between them, as supposed lovers, for example, never feels authentic, which is more than a little bit of a problem. And while Cohen strains to create a more compelling character, Reuben does the opposite, playing Nicole in such an understated way as to make her feel mostly overshadowed. Still, with all that said, there’s a very fine, intelligent, and entertaining play trying to emerge here, well worth seeing if one goes in a forgiving mood. And with any luck, a further incarnation of A Nervous Smile will find its way in front of audiences at some future date, having benefited from this mostly very fine production, having bloomed from a somewhat gawky teenager, into a fully-developed, adult one whose nervous smile will have turned into one that’s a little more assured.
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