Matthew Pilieci as Wyatt, Mandy Moore as Dawn and James Kautz as Billy in Pied Pipers by Larry Cobra
The hippies are long gone, but you’d never know it from The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side, now playing at P.S. 122. A painfully prolonged look at four young activists living rent-free in exchange for running a vegan café, the entire show is a mass of contradictions and implausible characters.
Seeing Billy (James Kautz) pull out a cell phone after an argument during which the unstable Wyatt (Mathew Pilieci) smashes David Bowie and Elton John records and Dawn (Mandy Nicole Moore) flits about the stage admonishing them to “Be love!” is an astonishing moment—these characters, all clad in ‘60s attire, are today’s activists? With their polyamorous living situation and Billy’s drug habit, they certainly don’t resemble any Lower East Side denizens currently proselytizing the masses. Where are their skinny jeans, chunky glasses and American Apparel T-shirts?
Things only get worse when their fourth roommate Dear (Sarah Lemp) enters, spouting philosophy and didactic explanations about their way of life to Billy’s unbelieving younger brother Evan (Nick Lawson). But while Dear is never at a loss for words when explaining away bad behavior or expounding on how running a vegan café is saving the world, no one bothers to explain how Dear decided that quitting her job as a pro bono lawyer to wear an apron was a step in the right direction.
The actors don’t help matters much. Lemp is a shrill and annoying presence, a charmless young Marcia Gay Harden; Kautz has taken Billy’s drug addictions to their extreme by slurring his way through dialogue and then beaming beatifically at no one during the grating final scene. And Moore is so resolutely dippy that she seems to have escaped from the uptown tribe in Hair. When the cleverest thing about a play is its male nudity, the Pied Piper has led you astray
Just a few blocks away from P.S. 122 is New York Theatre Workshop’s Things of Dry Hours, another dry play about a dusty topic that no one has bothered to polish up. Instead of the hippies, playwright Naomi Wallace has taken up Communism in 1930s Alabama. Surely there’s nothing more invigorating in 2009 than a debate about Marxism, right? In addition to plenty of economic debates, Wallace has also tossed in a bunch of flowery speeches from party member Tice Hogan (Delroy Lindo), an African-American who tries to recruit on-the-lam Corbin Teel (Garret Dillahunt). Race, communism and the search for happiness are all picked up, thoroughly examined, and then set back down. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no magic left after such a thorough investigation.
Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has done little to enliven the limp and verbose proceedings, though he does include one bizarre sequence in which Tice’s daughter Callie (Roslyn Ruff) watches as her laundry soars and shimmies through the air. And though she’s forced to feign wonder and astonishment as sheets flap about her head like Mothra, Ruff is easily the best thing about Things of Dry Hours. Unencumbered by the clumsy debates that Wallace has mistaken for dialogue, Ruff is allowed a series of insults and wisecracks that would be exasperating had she not imbued them with a terrible sense of weariness that does more to convey Callie’s modest ambition to simply survive than any of Tice and Corbin’s debates about the color of their skin or the prospects of their wallets.
They’re trying to survive, too, but Wallace gives their lives short shrift in favor of their ideologies. Metaphors fly fast and quick throughout the play, but none of them ever take root. Wallace can compare humanity to apples as often as she likes, but Things of Dry Hours is ultimately emotionally rotten.
>The Pied Pipers of the Lower East Side
Through June 28, P.S. 122, 150 1st Ave. (at E. 9th St.), 212-352-3101; times vary, $25.
>Things of Dry Hours
Through June 28, New York Theatre Workshop, 79 E. 4th St. (betw. 2nd Ave. & Bowery), 212-239-6200; times vary, $65.
