Morena Baccarin and Christopher Evan Welch in Teresa Rebeck's 'Our House' / Photo by Joan Marcus
Can someone please send copies of the film Network to playwright Theresa Rebeck and everyone at Playwrights Horizons? If anyone involved with Rebeck’s new satire, Our House, had bothered to watch the Paddy Chayefsky classic, they would have had second thoughts about putting on Rebeck’s latest potshot at the entertainment world—this time focusing on network news and reality TV.
Yes, New York audiences are being treated to a satire about reality TV in the year 2009. Never mind that most of Rebeck’s points were made with far more potency in 1976. Screenwriter Chayefsky’s script details the increasingly outrageous bids for higher ratings by a ruthless TV executive, who blurs the line between news and entertainment by manipulating her star anchor and orchestrating murder and mayhem on the air. Rebeck’s story revolves around a network executive (Christopher Evan Welch) and his quest for higher ratings as he blurs the line between entertainment and news with his star anchor, Jennifer Ramirez (Morena Baccarin), while a group of housemates simultaneously falls apart over one roommate’s reality TV addiction. Eventually, Rebeck brings the two plots together in what was surely meant to be a blackly comedic exposé of the ruthlessness of TV executives.
Except…what’s left to expose? Just last week, I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here premiered on NBC, in which a group of Z-list entertainment professionals (and Patti Blagojevich) camp out in a Costa Rican jungle and eat disgusting animal bits in daily competition. Since the first episode, professional fame whores Spencer and Heidi Pratt have “tantalized” America by leaving the show and then returning multiple times, while damning comments from NBC executives have flooded the Internet. Anyone with a passing acquaintance with primetime network television these days will not be surprised by just how badly Rebeck’s characters behave in the name of ratings.
Director Michael Mayer keeps the pace as snappy as possible, but he and his actors are frequently bogged down by Rebeck’s lengthy diatribes about America—particularly a climactic speech from TV addict Merv, played by Jeremy Strong in a highly annoying performance. Merv is jeering, deeply dumb and argumentative; he’s the quintessential roommate horror, and Strong does nothing to make him even remotely palatable. So why should audiences take seriously his semi-coherent ramblings about the state of America and the deep-rooted need for mindless entertainment?
Not that the other characters have anything better to say. Baccarin is as bland as a mid-afternoon local news anchor, and if she doesn’t actually screw up her face in an attempt to remember her lines while throwing diva fits, she certainly leaves the impression that she has. Welch is appropriately noxious as the head of the network, but Rebeck has thrown in so many showbiz clichés while whipping up the character that there’s little for Welch to do than act like a Teflon-coated buffoon.
Only Stephen Kunken manages to capture our attention as Stu, the conscience-riddled head of network news. Appalled but obedient, Stu transcends Rebeck’s spotty writing to becomes something more than a pawn in her ongoing feud with television. Instead, Stu is a man who wakes up one morning to find that all the compromises he’s made to keep his job have left him stranded in a moral no man’s land. The problem with the rest of the play is that Rebeck has very specific notions of what is and is not moral—and most of them are glaringly obvious.
Through June 21. Playwrights Horizons, 416 W 42nd St. (between 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-279-4200; $65.
