Were New York Critics Moved by Jon Robin Baitz's The Paris Letter?

Jon Robin Baitz's The Paris Letter officially arrived in New York on June 12, when it opened at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Laura Pels Theatre. The play had its world premiere at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles last year and received mixed reviews. But this is a new production staged by recent Tony winner Doug Hughes with only Ron Rifkin remaining from the original cast. Did critics find this staging impressive?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say?

Eric Grode in his Broadway.com Review: "When you start blaming the Enron collapse on your protagonist's sexual confusion, a little perspective might be called for. That's more or less what the verbally nimble, morally curious Baitz suggests in The Paris Letter, a mixed bag of populist indignation and reductive psychology… Despite some insinuating performances and several patches of forceful writing, it gets sort of lost along the way."

Charles Isherwood of The New York Times: "Mr. Rifkin and Mr. Glover elucidate their knotty interaction with gratifying precision. Love, pity and contempt can flicker in quick waves across Mr. Glover's angular features during just a few lines of dialogue, while Mr. Rifkin's shrewd, economical performance signals the slow working of the poison in Sandy's soul. But the intriguing lineaments of Sandy and Anton's relationship are not, in the end, fully explored, because Mr. Baitz has stretched his morality play about the dire ramifications of sexual repression across an excessively large canvas… The plot hinges on an urgent missive sent with a foreign postmark, but despite its broad scope, The Paris Letter lacks the substance of a major epistle from the gifted, always interesting Mr. Baitz. It more resembles a series of disconnected postcards."

Frank Scheck of The New York Post: "At first engrossing, The Paris Letter begins to lose its moorings when the playwright piles on a succession of melodramatic plot elements--from financial ruin to suicide to cancer to an ending that won't be revealed here… Director Doug Hughes, a recent Tony winner for his sensitive staging of Doubt, is ultimately unable to fully tame the play's excesses. He has, however, elicited sterling performances from Rifkin even if the actor is beginning to seem all too familiar in these Master of the Universe roles and the entire cast, with particularly moving work by Pawk as the two key people in the main character's life."

David Rooney of Variety: "The play is graced by elegant writing and sensitive observation of the compromises that inhibit the pursuit of love and happiness. But the sprawling, complex work takes too long to reveal itself and, while always absorbing, it feels frustratingly unfocused and emotionally remote. Despite Rifkin's evident connection to the playwright…and despite the actor's compelling perf, there's something missing from the characterization. Sandy remains an opaque figure, detached, uncharming and unsympathetic; the guilt and shame that have trapped this savvy man into denying himself and inadvertently hurting the people he loves feel oddly insubstantial."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Baitz is an intelligent, provocative writer, who specializes in moral conundrums, most successfully in such fine plays as The Substance of Fire and Three Hotels. Those dilemmas are present here, too, but a self-consciousness infects the writing, a straining to fit the characters to the problems the playwright wants to explore. There's also a precocious bit of name-dropping… Director Doug Hughes has done a remarkable job in keeping this melodrama spinning, and the cast, particularly Glover and Rifkin, plays it for all it's worth."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "Paris Letter feels disjointed--a mosaic that, when finally viewed as a whole, adds up to less than the undeniable beauty of its pieces. Also, the story, which moves back and forth between 1962 and 2002, between New York and Paris, makes our conceptual leaps feel more of a burden than an inevitability."