David Lindsay-Abaire's Wonder of the World Is Too Pat; Michael Frayne's Noises Off Turns the Sex Farce Inside-Out

I got all choked up at the public library the other day, right there in the middle of the newly swanked-up Theater on Film and Tape division, where I’d gone to check out a couple of plays I’d missed in seasons passed, Sylvia and David Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers. Sylvia is the A.R. Gurney play in which Sarah Jessica Parker played a not-very-bright, but basically well-meaning poodle-and-Labrador mix, and it had me bawling like a baby. This is not something you want to have happen to you on the third floor of the Performing Arts Library, where they don’t let you carry a purse or even wear a jacket, which is silly (there’s nothing a person could take away with them from the Film and Tape division but insights and memories) and probably unhealthy, as it’s cold as hell in there. I may have been a little gruff when I went up to ask the librarian to change the tape and muttered that they really ought to keep a box of Kleenex around.

Astute readers may have guessed the nature of my research. I had been to see Lindsay-Abaire’s new play at the Manhattan Theater Club, Wonder of the World, in which Parker is appearing, and I was very cross and I wanted to cut them both some slack. Also, I wanted to see whether Lindsay-Abaire is as much of a phony as Wonder of the World would suggest. I know Parker, whom I’ve always liked rather a lot, isn’t a phony. She’s smart and funny, as well as being sexy in a completely self-invented way, and there’s a lovely understatement–a clarity and simplicity–that she always brings to her Big Dramatic Moments, like the point in the Gurney play where the dog tells the wife what’s what. Abaire’s new souped-up sitcom requires Parker to play terminally and frenetically cute, which is almost as exhausting for us as it must be for her, and too bad as she’s already cute to begin with. It’s the sort of play that Playwrights Horizons gave up producing 10 years ago–zany-picaresque, I guess you could call it–about a woman who, having decided that the life she was living in Park Slope was not the one she was supposed to have, leaves her husband of seven years (Alan Tudyk) and goes off in search of herself.

Armed with a checklist of more than 250 things she’s always wanted to do (written on several yards of adding-machine tape that, in one of the play’s relentless sight-gags, she keeps pulling out), Cass (Parker) strikes out for Niagara Falls, where, she is convinced, she was supposed to meet the man of her dreams on a family vacation that she missed because she was getting married. On the bus to Niagara she meets Lois (Kristine Nielsen), a suicidal woman traveling with a barrel in which she plans to go over the falls as a way of getting back at the husband who abandoned her. The two become fast friends, and the rest of the play is a journey of discovery. It’s junk-picaresque, really. Niagara (the American side, of course) turns out to be full of crassness and loud, ugly people, all of which Cass proceeds to revel in, seeming to find it refreshing and delightful. She borrows the bad wig of a fellow tourist with "female pattern balding" (one of a series of grotesques played by Amy Sedaris), sleeps with the captain of the sightseeing boat (Kevin Chamberlin), takes a helicopter ride...etc. etc. All things on her list of previously unexperienced experiences, while her frantic husband, after hiring a couple of neophyte private detectives (Marylouise Burke and Bill Raymond), follows her and tries to win her back.

I don’t want to be accused of jumping to conclusions, but purely on the basis of this and Lindsay-Abaire’s first play, I would say that he has a thing about women taking control of their lives–or about them not being in control. He thinks that’s a bad idea. Fuddy Meers, which I watched dutifully at the library, finding it alternately poignant and amusing, was about a woman with amnesia who is kidnapped by her abusive former husband and ultimately returned to a marriage she had no choice about entering into. Like Wonder of the World, Fuddy Meers was filled with zaniness, loopy characters and extravagant violence. But it was also ambiguous: it was ultimately unclear (and unclear while you were watching it) whether what we were seeing was the truth or some dream-fantasia that the damaged heroine dreamed night after night. This uncertainty alone would have made it good theater and given it a certain moral anchor and honesty. But there were elements of deep emotional truth all over the place in Fuddy Meers, as well–in the characters and the wild things they did. The characters in Wonder of the World are all punchlines, and the ones who aren’t punchlines are running gags. The discarded husband journeys up to Niagara listening to the Carpenters (punchline). He likes to swallow Barbie-doll heads for the pleasure that passing them in his stool affords (running gag). The steamboat captain is a bulk-discount-store enthusiast (running gag), whose wife was killed while trying to reach down a giant jar of peanut butter (punchline). She sold cotton candy across from the wax museum (punchline). Niagara is full of theme restaurants (running gag).

One problem is the level of the humor. The dialogue largely follows the A-A-B rhyme scheme of television comedy (line, line, joke; line, line joke) and for the rest consists mostly of easy reversals. A device Lindsay-Abaire loves and runs into the ground is the wacky-recognition, where one character demonstrates a sustained piece of bizarre behavior and, after a pause, another character remarks on it. Thus, Lois, toward the beginning of the play, after a long, disjointed speech from Cass: "Are you on something?" And again, Lois, toward the end of the play, after a long, overwrought speech from Cass’ husband: "You’re kind of high-strung, aren’t you?" The comic climax is a group-therapy session in which all the characters are forced to participate in a version of The Newlywed Game.

It’s all rather tiresome and familiar, but there’s a nastiness to the whole thing, too, which I don’t think the author intended but which neither Parker nor the director, Christopher Ashley, can do anything about. Cass is a monster of solipsism and self-indulgence, really. Her treatment of people and attitude toward them are entirely determined by the degree to which they represent an obstacle or aid to her self-fulfillment.

I don’t know how a line like this one, uttered seriously–"How do you know what socks to put on in the morning when the color alone could change your life?"–would have played before Sept. 11. Now it seems incredibly distasteful. It’s as if Lindsay-Abaire, having caught a few too many showings of the old Marilyn Monroe picture Niagara on AMC, had decided to go up north and stick his toe in the icky lower-middle-class tourist culture of America, and then came home and tried to write a Christopher Durang play. But Durang’s wit and satirical barbs were always fueled by genuine anger (not to mention a certain amount of genius). Lindsay-Abaire has nothing really to say, here, and his Buffalo-Gothic–all that wide-eyed wonder at the excesses of American consumerism and kitsch–is, like his heroine’s delight in them, as phony as his desperate groping after whimsicality. The play ends with an endlessly peripatetic Thelma-and-Louise sequence in which Cass and Lois try to throw themselves over the falls. (They’re off; they’ve bought it; what this?; they have a parachute–yay!; Whoops–no, they don’t; uh-oh, they’re goners!; What’s this? They’re stuck! No way! It’s a miracle! Hooray, they’re safe!) Epiphany:

Noises Off
By Michael Frayn