Let’s hear it for likable losers. Not the self-pitying sad
sacks and creepy men-children that populate the résumés of Seth Rogen
and Paul Giamatti, but the pleasant dope who for some reason—chronic
anxiety, general incompetence or an excessive affection for the
reefer—never seem to make it very far up the ladder of adult
achievement. I’d much rather talk to those guys than Philip Seymour
Hoffman’s latest seething sociopath.
Jack, a middle-aged
New York limo driver with ambitions of driving for the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority, is one of those guys. He was played by Hoffman
in a recent off-Broadway production and subsequent film (in Hoffman’s
typically creepy style), but I don’t think the playwright, Bob Glaudini,
had a creep in mind. Jack is a stoner with his hair twisted into
halfhearted nascent dreads, who plays the Melodians’ “Rivers of Babylon”
so often that the cassette has stretched and the music warbles
ominously. As played by Todd Van Voris in Artists Rep’s production of
this romantic comedy (directed by Allen Nause), he comes across as a
genuinely nice guy, whom you’d be happy to have haul your rich self
around.
When Jack is
introduced to Connie (Emily Sahler Beleele), a morbid and mousy
co-worker of his best friend’s wife, he begins a hesitant and clumsy
courtship. Connie wants to go boating, so he learns to swim. She’d like
to be cooked for, so he obsessively braises and chops. Their
relationship’s slow blossoming is charming, but less riveting to watch
than the troubled marriage of his best friend and fellow driver, Clyde
(John San Nicolas), and his wife, Lucy (Tai Simmons). Clyde and Lucy are
aspirational types, striving to obtain better coffee and better weed,
as impassioned in their marriage as in their trespasses. Their exertion
in their work and tendency to inflict cruelty on one another feels truer
than Jack’s fumbling romance, and their persistence in the face of
repeated mutual betrayal is as convincing a defense of the value of
marriage as any I’ve seen. San Nicolas and Simmons convey roiling
discord, absentminded intimacy and reckless affection—and what more is
married life about?
SEE IT: Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison
St., 241-1278, artistsrep.org. 7:30 pm Tuesdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7:30
pm Sundays, 11 am Wednesday, April 6. Closes April 17. $20-$42.
