Did Critics Find Greenberg's House in Town Welcoming?

The House in Town, the new off-Broadway offering by Richard Greenberg Three Days of Rain; A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, flung open its elegant brownstone doors on June 19 at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre. Set in Chelsea in 1929, the play takes on the foreboding issues of a rich, childless couple on the eve of the stock market crash. Did feel they got their money's worth?

Here's a sampling of what they had to say:

Rob Kendt in his Broadway.com review: "What could possibly bring the Hammers down? It's not the impending stock-market crash, as you might suspect at the top of The House in Town, Richard Greenberg's grim, stately, quietly devastating new play…. The cast is excellent, headed by Jessica Hecht and Mark Harelik as the attractive but hopeless central couple. …An expert mixer of light comedy with dark dramatic strains, here [Greenberg] reverses the recipe, edging gingerly into the fraught realm of Strindberg or Ibsen. His climax even explicitly references the painful feminist awakening of A Doll's House. If The House in Town doesn't quite reach those towering heights, Hughes and this expert cast nevertheless give this dark meditation the concentrated emotional punch of a wrecking ball."

Charles Isherwood in The New York Times: "A busy season for Richard Greenberg fizzles to a close with The House in Town, a wan new drama about an American marriage slowly imploding in the days before the country's economy did the same, more suddenly and spectacularly, back in 1929….The House in Town, which opened last night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in a pretty but desultory production directed by Doug Hughes, is a hollow and diffuse social study that imparts few coherent insights into the issues it vaguely raises about the tensions of marriage or the mercenary corruptions of American culture, then or now. Mr. Greenberg's perceptive wit makes a few welcome appearances—there is a delicious running gag about the various definitions of the word 'gossip'—but the play meanders to its glum conclusion without engaging us on either an emotional or an intellectual level."

Frank Scheck in The New York Post: "While The House in Town again demonstrates the playwright's facility for incisive dialogue and provocative situations, it's far from convincing, coming across as ersatz Henry James as filtered through 1940s Warner Brothers…. You can feel Greenberg straining to provide a contemporary resonance to his tale, the culmination of which reaches melodramatic proportions. But ultimately, the characters and situations come across as an awkward attempt to deliver a modern equivalent to the sort of period drama in which bold themes needed to be expressed through subtle euphemisms…. The most effective element of the production is the fierce performance by Hecht the beloved ex-wife in the film Sideways, who inhabits her character with a powerful intensity that nearly manages to give the proceedings dramatic credibility."

Joe Dziemianowicz in The New York Daily News: "Location is everything, and Richard Greenberg has picked a swank Manhattan address for his new play, The House in Town, a sleek but slim drama boasting a commanding performance by Jessica Hecht…. There are also a few soapy twists, like a revelation that comes three quarters into the story and changes the tenor drastically. But in the end, there's an underdeveloped feel from the prolific playwright. The story here is about a townhouse, but Greenberg has provided enough substance to fill only an alcove studio. As directed by Doug Hughes, the cast is uniformly terrific. Harelik is dapper and dignified as a man whose past business dealings come back to haunt him…. But it is Hecht who captivates in the play's tricky centerpiece role, morphing from a woman with a fuzzy, far-away quality to her voice to one who barks in fury with cutting precision. It's enough to rock the front door of that fancy manse off its hinges. And it's reason enough to go to Town."

David Rooney in Variety: "On the strength of The House in Town, the playwright might be advised to decrease his productivity and channel his energies into more fully realized works. While it's arguably preferable to the hollow mirth of A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, the more somber new play is frustrating and unfocused— a rambling bundle of urbane sophistication and melancholy philosophical musings that never quite comes together…. Director Doug Hughes has given the production a surface finesse, and the characters' moneyed world is stylishly rendered in John Lee Beatty's sets, Catherine Zuber's costumes and Brian MacDevitt's lighting. But despite Greenberg's witty dialogue, the visual elegance is not matched by clarity of purpose in the writing, giving the nagging feeling of cleverness for its own sake. There's no real sense of what the play is about. Hecht is a charismatic stage actor with a refined technique, but she's basically wrong for the part, which calls for a dreamy Mia Farrow type, her feet not quite firmly rooted in reality."