"Seven… Five… Three… One… Seven… Five… Three… One…": THINGS WE WANT

The big problem with working the theatre is this: when you’re working, so is everyone else. This leads to an issue of timing: that is, when you work in the theatre, it’s nearly impossible to go see theatre, because the rare moments you have off from work, everyone else has off as well.

Case in point: this past Friday night was the first time I had time to go to the theatre for un-work-related reasons since August.

Did I mention that it’s currently DECEMBER?

For those of us who live and breathe this art, that’s far too long a time to go without; however, when you’re juggling multiple rehearsal schedules that involve as many as two directors, twelve actors, two designers, and two playwrights, naturally, your time is at a premium, and very rarely do you have any of it free. However, miracle upon miracles, this week the planets aligned and I found myself with the time, money, and inclination to head to the theatre as a patron. The New Group boasts special “$10 @ 10 student and starving artist” performances, allowing those of us who are usually working or rehearsing until 8 or 9pm to go see good theatre at affordable prices. Needless to say, I think this is a marvelous idea. So, on Friday night, I found myself with one of the aforementioned playwrights at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row, ready to take in a 10pm performance of Things We Want, the new play by Jonathan Marc Sherman.

Sherman is perhaps best known for Women and Wallace, a play stunning for many reasons, and all the more so for the fact that it was written by Sherman at the age of 18 and produced before its playwright had turned 20. A fairly classic tale of a theatrical wunderkind thrown into a frantic spiral of substance abuse subsequently unfolded, until finally in 2001, a panic attack so violent as to resemble a heart attack, Sherman went into rehab. Now 39, he has been sober and in therapy ever since, and after a nearly ten-year hiatus from the theatre, his play Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke, opened on 7 November 2007, in association with the New Group.

Things We Want centers around three brothers, the youngest of who has just returned to his childhood home after dropping out of culinary school and being dumped by Zelda, the (unseen) love of his life. Of course, the apartment to which he returns is the apartment in which he and his brother grew up. It also happens to be the apartment in which both of their parents committed suicide by jumping out of the prominent living room window within five years of each other, and the ghosts of these events haunt both the apartment and the brothers who can’t bear to move out of it. What unfolds is how these three over-grown boys cope with these and other ghosts of their scattered, shattered lives-- or, rather, whether or not they CAN cope with them.

If the plot seems a touch old, Sherman’s trademark pithy dialogue keeps it interesting, and the action is well-structured. The window looms over the play in the same way the portrait of the General looms over Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, and while the symbolism sometimes comes across as hit-you-over-the-head-obvious (everything ranging from t-shirts to video tapes to remote controls to people end up threatening a trip out the window), it also allows for a solid selection of funny and/or heart-wrenching moments that propel the story forward with athletic leaps and twirls. Hawke’s direction handles the pace and rhythm of the play well, though occasionally it loses sight of the poignancy of the tale within; I’ll confess that there were a number of moments that didn’t hit me quite as they should have. However, I could see how they were supposed to land, which is infinitely better than missing the mark completely, so points for trying. Hawke’s staging also uses the space well. Designed by Derek McLane, the naturalistic, and therefore mostly enclosed, set contained enough suggestions of continued space (a hallway with doors to two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen with a door to a third bedroom, as well as the front door of the apartment itself and the gigantic living room window) to build an apartment that extended beyond the reach of the visible, rounding out the world in a wonderfully complete way.

The small ensemble cast features Paul Dano (widely known for not speaking because of Friedrich Nietzsche) as Charlie, the would-be chef; Josh Hamilton (Sherman’s original Wallace; also last seen as Nicholas Ogarev in The Coast of Utopia at LCT) as Teddy, the oldest brother, who works for and follows the creed of a self-help guru calling himself Dr. Miracle; Peter Dinklage (The Station Agent, Death at a Funeral, Richard III at the Public) as Sty, the middle brother and raging alcoholic; and Zoe Kazan (granddaughter of that Kazan) as Stella, the young woman who undoes, but perhaps ultimately saves, all three of the men. Dano and Kazan both show some fine, if slightly inconsistent, work. Hamilton turns in a solid performance, notable because he manages to make an unlikeable character watchable. More importantly, though (and perhaps it is because of this that Teddy is so watchable), he makes him understandable without condoning his actions. We see where he’s coming from; but this doesn’t excuse him, and Hamilton’s Teddy offers no excuses. However, it is Dinklage’s performance that truly stands out.

A wonderful actor with a magnificent sense of how the stage works (quite honestly, he could sit there and page through the phone book and it would be absolutely riveting), Dinklage is in fine form here. While it is undeniable that in order for there to be drama and conflict, characters must play action and objective, rather than emotion, things get really interesting when you consider what physical and emotional state or condition in which the character is. This affects how the action and objective are played, and while of course we’re usually interested in whether or not the character achieves his or her objective, what makes it worth watching is how they get there. To that end, consider the following: two of the most difficult things to pull off onstage are klutziness and drunkenness. Mishandled, these two conditions can come across as messy, unformed, and lazy. However, in the extremely capable hands of Dinklage, Sty’s Act One drunkenness comes across with the same clarity and precision as Billy Crudup’s klutziness as Belinsky in The Coast of Utopia did: admirable both because of the reality for the character and the awareness of the actor, it’s like watching Chaplin. More than this, though, Dinklage provides at once weakness, strength, bullheadedness, and heart in a way that rings so true that it hits you right in the gut before reaching up and tugging on your heartstrings a bit on its way up to settle in your mind for some well-motivated thought.

The title of the play is perhaps transparent; but in a way, it makes an otherwise naturalistic play into a metatheatrical comment that is bigger than the sum of its parts. “What do you want?” Teddy questions Charlie, who answers tearfully, “I want to be happy!” Now, as noted above, characters (or rather, the actors who portray them) have to play action and objective, or there is no drama and no conflict. The objective is what you want; the action is how you go about trying to get it. “Be-ing” anything-- such as “being happy”-- is never a choice any decent actor will make in terms their want because of its passivity. So the conundrum then becomes: if the character Charlie says he wants to be happy, what does he actually, actively want? Maybe he wants “to love”; maybe he wants “to find somebody to love”; maybe he wants acceptance. The bottom line is that what he thinks he wants is not actually what he wants, and it is only in bridging the gap between the perceived want and the actual, slightly subconscious want that Charlie can begin to engage in any sort of conflict-- that is, to come alive as a character.

And this, I think, is ultimately what the play is about: it’s about learning that what you think you want isn’t necessarily what you want, and discovering this vital fact is the only possible way to move on, to grow, and, indeed, to grow UP. After all, in the words of the great philosophers Jagger and Richards, if you try sometime, you just might find…

…You get what you need.