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.
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.
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