Did Critics Toast MTC's Revival of Absurd Person Singular?

Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singularopened at the Biltmore Theatre on October 18. The comedy is one in a long line of plays by the author that has been produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club. This piece, directed by John Tillinger, deals with three couples played by Mireille Enos, Clea Lewis, Alan Ruck, Deborah Rush, Paxton Whitehead and Sam Robards, three kitchens and three Christmas Eves. Did New York critics wish Absurd Person Singular good cheer?

Here is a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com Review: "The tone is lightweight and often farcical, but the three-act comedy also makes sharp, subtle observations about the British class system… The production is generally strong, although Tillinger accentuates the comedy and at times skirts over the darker moments. John Lee Beatty's sets are solid looking, but the first kitchen is too upscale while the others are too shabby. Jane Greenwood's costumes are just right, however. Of the six actors, Whitehead and Rush are the standouts."

Ben Brantley of The New York Times: "What is generally missing here, though, is a sustained awareness of the ghost in the play's comic machinery, for all of Mr. Ayckbourn's ingeniously constructed fun houses are haunted by failure and loneliness. This hyper-prolific dramatist more than 60 plays and counting has never been as popular in the United States as in Britain though the Manhattan Theater Club, which has produced five other Ayckbourn comedies, has done its best to keep his work before New Yorkers. This culture gap would seem to have less to do with American audiences' willingness to accept the sadness in Ayckbourn than with American casts and directors' inability to deliver it. Finding the obvious laughs in Mr. Ayckbourn's work is child's play; uncovering the richer humor requires taking his characters seriously."

Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News: "The revival of Alan Ayckbourn's Absurd Person Singular at the Biltmore begins as almost outlandish farce and ends on a tone both unsettling and cruel. If this inconsistency is jarring, theatergoers should blame the director, John Tillinger, rather than the author. Ayckbourn is a far subtler playwright than his compatriot Harold Pinter, who recently won the Nobel Prize. Ayckbourn's plays sometimes verge on farce, but they only work if you believe the characters. As soon as the curtain goes up on Tillinger's production of Absurd, you see two people whose behavior is so manic that you immediately discount them as caricatures."

David Rooney of Variety: "[This production] does offer one significant reward in Mireille Enos, who follows her fragile dipsomaniac Honey in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a compelling comic turn that takes her from a pill popper dangerously skirting the edge of insanity to a catatonic ragdoll to a woman back from the abyss, stripped of her pride and yet still wearily detached and imperious. Arguably Tillinger's most glaring slip-up is his decision to paint the central couple, lower-class up-and-comers Sidney and Jane Hopcroft Alan Ruck, Clea Lewis, as innocuous innocents--a glimmer of calculation beneath their eager-to-please social ineptitude might have given the Hopcrofts' climb from the margins of suburbia to prosperity and power a little bite. Instead, there's barely a hint of self-satisfaction as these former nobodies become circus ringmasters in control of the once rich and successful associates who so disdained them. The timid approach undermines Ruck's work in particular."

Michael Kuchwara of The Associated Press: "Absurd Person Singular is a most unusual work by this most prolific of British playwrights: a farce tinged with sadness, a knowing awareness of human imperfection. The play, which was revived Tuesday at Broadway's Biltmore Theatre, requires delicate handling, a balancing act of considerable skill by a sextet of actors. This less-than-precise production, courtesy of Manhattan Theatre Club, isn't quite up to the task, tripped by some overacting and the broad direction of John Tillinger… These are not unsympathetic people, and they should not be played as cartoons. Here, particularly in the case of the relentlessly chirpy Lewis, they sometimes veer toward the one-dimensional, flat characters with one defining trait, usually annoying."

Elysa Gardner of USA Today: "The physical high jinks in Singular are just as visually engaging, thanks to John Tillinger's direction of actors who prove nimble in every sense of the word. The farcical elements of Ayckbourn's script require one of them, the lovele Mireille Enos - who proves just as masterfully droll as the pill-popping Eva as she was playing Honey in last season's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - to dangle out a window, slide off a table and end up on the wrong side od a slamming door. But there is pathos underlying all these wacky shenanigans, and it's to the credit of Singular's author, director and cast that this Manhattan Theatre Company production avoids the kind of jarring sentimentality that more high-minded domestic comedies can flirt with."

Linda Winer of Newsday: "The results are three deftly performed, technically meticulous, mildly amusing little sketches separated by two energy-sapping intermissions. Things culminate in a nicely nasty twist of class revenge. The cast is sharp and, despite the apparent weight of English accents on a few performances, deliciously professional about whatever foolishness is necessary."