Here Comes the Thud

Thanks to the hubby I've been watching a bodacious amount of The Good Wife lately. I missed most or all of Season 1 but got drawn in early in Season 2. I really enjoyed the second and third seasons, despite the tendency of the show to hang far too much emotional and dramatic weight on the ridiculous, universal sin of infidelity. "Fer chrissake shut up and litigate," I found myself saying.

But then... last night... Season 4 Episode 8, "Here Comes the Judge". Or maybe "Here Comes the Judd".

By far the worst episode I've seen so far. In terms of plotting and dialog, it's hard to fathom a more likely explanation than that the writers all decided to try bath salts on the same day.

First we have a judge who is advertised as "playing it by the book"—this is coming from Kalinda, an investigator whose time in court is limited, so this judge must have a seriously loud reputation for being straitlaced—but who nonetheless engages in a drunken tirade in a public bar, hollering before witnesses that Will Gardner is going to lose the case he, Judge Straitlace, is currently adjudicating. Also that Mr. Gardner is a liar and a thief who doesn't deserve to practice law ever again. Ok, we learn later that Judge Straitlace just got divorced and fell off the wagon, so now it's a free-for-all.

We have Mr. Gardner and co-counsel planning and calling for an independent judicial review of that judge's obvious bias—without once considering that it might aid their case to call the main witness to the judge's tirade, a woman, incidentally, with whom Mr. Gardner was once involved. (Are there any women in the legal profession in Chicago with whom Mr. Gardner was not once involved?) We have Mr. Gardner finally—after a courtroom reversal makes everybody go "duh!"—approaching that witness... and having sex with her before mentioning he and Justice both need her help.

We have the universally idiotic walking contrivance of "tow-truck magnate Nick Savarese" a.k.a. "Mr, Kalinda" a.k.a. "Hey let's remake Clockwork Orange!", obsessing on Cary Agos, absolutely dead certain Mr. Agos is sleeping with his wife.

And we have insipid side-plots involving each of the Florrick teens:

(1) Zach successfully lies about his identity to take a volunteer IT job at his dad's campaign headquarters—and nobody recognizes him as the candidate's son. The newly hired IT boss pleads with Eli Gold because she really, really needs this one specific high-school kid IT volunteer to, I dunno, hack the Pentagon or some shit—but he won't stay. Of course, once Mr. Gold finds out it is Zach, now Zach really, really wants to stay, but he's afraid to even ask his mom about helping out at Dad's HQ. Because for some reason both parents treat the campaign trail with the same child-protective horror as an opium den, alligator pit, or witness box at an organized crime trial.

(2) For no reason and with no convincing in-show rationale, Grace obsesses on a boy at school whose girlfriend, also called Grace, just killed herself. "It's sad but I'm good," she tells her mom on the phone—a typical utterance, as if this wildly privileged, coddled, and engaged private school teen has never learned any polysyllabic adjectives. Even if we concede the moronic premise that this human child of normal(ish) intelligence is worrying, "Hey, my name is Grace too! That could have been me!", the sequitur is ridiculous: in the space of a few days she stalks the boy, accosts him, befriends him, BFFs him, SWFs him, invites him to her house, asks him about the sex he used to have with Dead Grace in the bushes and whether that's what he intends with her (Live Grace). And possibly takes up smoking cigarettes.

And through all this insulting rubbish there is not a bit of acting required of the luminous Ms. Julianna Margulies to relieve the painful stupidity of the episode.

The Way of the World (not Congreve) at Folger

Let's get this out of the way up front: At no point in its first act does The Way of the World—"A new comedy adapted from the play by William Congreve" playing at Folger Theatre through February 11—threaten to turn into a good play. Its satire is broad and obvious—if it even is satire; the word "whinging" seems more apt. Its characters (seven filthy rich persons summering in the Hamptons) seem types—or perhaps price tags—rather than persons. Its observations on class seem tired and rote, as if the playwright, Theresa Rebeck, admitted defeat at the outset on that particular windmill duel. Its appeals to social media for zeitgeist hipness have pretty much the same effect on the comedy as Botox has on the face. Its attempts at pathos—largely in the eighth character, an unnamed "Waitress" who serially addresses the audience as a sort of tour guide to income inequality—might as well have the character reciting the words "I really want your empathy, please." A little later, there's a deus ex machina involving that same waitress, a casual hook-up with Henry, and stolen baubles that is just insultingly, inexcusably sophomoric.

(Oh, and its costuming is ostentatiously weird. Not the play's fault.)

At more than one moment in act one the flagstone cast member, Kristine Nielsen as "Aunt Renée", appears to be "doing" Charlotte Rae as Edna Garrett in The Facts of Life. This is certainly not to cast shade at Ms. Rae (who still treads the Earth with us, BTW) or the much-beloved television program she helmed, which managed to transcend pablum on numerous occasions. But to be blunt, there is nothing in Aunt Renée's attempts to avoid certain abhorred words for her increasing age and weight that hasn't run rampant through popular entertainments since at least 1979 when The Facts of Life first aired—and more likely 1879. Sure, there are some genuine laughs peppered throughout; it's just that, at opening night Tuesday, it felt oddly like all the laughs had been laughed before.

The play concerns Mae, an incongruously principled heiress who wants to donate her $600 million trust toward the salvation of Haiti; her bonne vivante but pathologically insecure aunt; and Henry, the amoral young Lothario who has recently boinked them both. Throughout most of the play, as they used to say, "She'll none of him" for both values of "she"; and the central conflict is clearly about getting Mae to have at least some of him. This entails Henry deputizing the handsome and dashing (and gay) Lyle to "distract" Aunt Renée, leaving Mae ripe for recapture.

The problem with this central conflict is that who gives a fuck. It is unclear whether Rebeck intends to endow Henry with any more redeeming quality than the capacity to have a crush on somebody. If she does, it doesn't quite work: he's pretty unambiguously a shitheel. If she does not, I have to wonder why we're watching a play about his woes. Honestly, does a redemption story even count if the redeeming quality is "not being the biggest shitheel on stage"?

Anyway. Meanwhile, a gaggle of technically adult humans—Charles, Reg, Katrina, and the aforementioned Lyle—spend their idle hours (that is, their only hours) in gossip and backbiting, little of which is particularly clever. 

Of these, Charles in particular borders on stereotype: he is forthrightly a fashion queen—which is fine. There lies within all things a grain of truth. Who doesn't know a fashion queen or two? But he is also "gay man hopelessly in love with his straight friend". We know he is the latter because people in his circle will keep telling him this is the case—not, alas, because we are ever presented with textual or emotional evidence of his tortured, unrequited mooning. "I got drunk and let you suck me off once," Henry chides him, at which point any self-respecting gay man ought to have replied, "...That you remember" or "Oh, that was you?" or "You and 418 other straightbois" or "Yeah, and you're the one who insists on talking about it. What, are you waiting for a Yelp review?"

This tired predicament might broach iconoclasm if the character of Charles went anywhere, learned anything, or even—call me crazy—took a militantly "Yes I fucking am in love with Henry. My emotional train wreck is performance art. Fucking deal with it" position. Nope. Poor widdle sad faggot Charles just stands there as friend after friend explains how pathetic he is. Well, so he is. So, in fact, are all these people.

Even worse, given a and b above, is c = Rebeck allowing her Henry to upbraid Charles for his invisible torch without mocking or even noting the fact that he, Henry, spends most of the play energetically pursuing someone who similarly deigned just once to fuck him and now wants him not just gone but gone gone.

Now I warrant you: in this sort of piece the modern playwright is up against the shadows not only of Congreve but of Wilde and Moliere and Albee and Guare, and them's some fierce fucking shadows to measure up to. Nonetheless, I sat there disappointed that scene after scene failed to measure up to the wit or emotional depth of Sex and the City.

Imagine my surprise when, most of the way through the second act, the play—and the character of Renée—abruptly grew up. In the space of a single scene, a confrontation between Renée and Henry that starts and ends quietly but contains all the screams of the damned, Ms. Rebeck goes all in—and wins the pot. It is breathtaking to watch. No offense to Luigi Sottile, who plays Henry, but apart from the author it is Ms. Nielsen who really pulls off this coup: with this scene—and then again in the play's final scene—she complicates her character, and the play's character, tenfold. One minute she is a near-cartoon who, in attempting to seduce a gay man, misuses the phrase amuse bouche; the next she is a woman of immense dignity, anger, passion, self-doubt, joy, regret, and survival instinct. The shift in tone is palpable. It is almost but not quite violent enough to capsize the play—it certainly casts some shame on the hour and a half of blithely caustic bitchery that preceded it. But that really salvages the whole from mediocrity. The play ends in uncomfortable ambiguity, its lackluster comedy dragged back from Hades by a glint of deadly serious drama.