Are You Nobody Too?

Elling, the final new Broadway show of 2010, feels as if a blithe typhoon has washed it up in the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Scott Pask’s boxy set looks as if it’s been stranded in the middle of the stage, bordered on all sides by inky darkness. And surely one reason Brendan Fraser, making his Broadway debut, insists on screaming all of his lines is a half-hearted attempt on his part to call for help.

Alas, none is forthcoming, neither for the talented cast nor for the bored audience. A stage adaptation of Ingvar Ambjørsen’s novels (which have also been fodder for three films), Elling follows an Odd Couple-formula by sticking polar opposites in an apartment together and watching the wackiness ensue. The twist? Kjell (Fraser) and Elling (Denis O’Hare) meet in a psychiatric hospital! Cue chuckles.

Or cue crickets, more accurately. Watching the loutish Kjell (Elling calls him an orangutan) and the tightly wound Elling attempt to carve out lives for themselves without the benefit of a single social skill betwixt them is hardly laugh-out-loud funny. Perhaps for those who didn’t see O’Hare as the persnickety homosexual in Take Me Out or the persnickety Oscar in Sweet Charity, his persnickety performance as Elling would be hilarious. If only he didn’t seem to be working in a vacuum.

Blame Simon Bent’s adaptation, which seems to set characters and plot developments on rafts and then float them idly past the stranded performers. Here’s a mean, bitter nurse (Jennifer Coolidge, in one of a quartet of roles) who warns Elling and Kjell on the day they leave that they’ll be back. Spoiler alert: We never see her again.

Or how about poor Richard Easton, so hurriedly introduced that we’re unprepared for the prominence of his role as a mysterious older man who becomes a mentor to Elling. Time flies by abruptly, only to be periodically loudly enunciated by one or another of the characters: “You have been with us two years now”; “Winter is nearly gone, soon spring will be here”; “That was two months ago.”

Director Doug Hughes can’t figure out how to make any of it click, certainly not the relationship between Elling and Kjell. Fraser’s performance is the definition of one-note, and it’s a loud one, somewhere between a prolonged grunt and a bellow. He’s so crass and O’Hare is so prim that their blossoming friendship is beyond the realm of possibility. (Also, the two actors’ ages make this chance-at-a-real-life plot seem more like a last chance.)

Coolidge, in her four roles, employs her usual oddball voices and squinty eyes, but they’re amusing in the way any performer who superimposes her own personality on a role always is. At least she adds a dash of life to the proceedings; Easton seems both annoyed and uncertain as to why he’s standing in the middle of a barren stage, talking excitedly about “The Sauerkraut Poet” (don’t ask.) Jeremy Shamos, as an exasperated social worker, gets away entirely unscathed. As an embodiment of the first half of this Broadway season, Elling is more successful: relatively brief, relatively painless and resoundingly unnecessary.

Elling

Through March 20, 2011, Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St. (betw. B’way & 8th Aves.), 212-239-6200; $46.50–$126.50.