I’m not sure I’m the best
critical filter to review Joshua Harmon’s
Significant Other (from
the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Laura Pels Theatre) because I’m just too
many generations past its youthful focus to find it that fresh or that
interesting, and that keeps me from being entirely fair to it.
The
play centers around Jordan (Gideon Glick)
a young, single, gay man who seems perfectly nice in every regard, but is
nonetheless unable to find romantic love and companionship; so he takes solace
in his girl friend contemporaries (Lindsay Mendez, Sas Goldberg and Barra Petterson) and
holds in his heartbreak as, one by one, they get married off. His homosexuality
is never an issue for his sympathetic grandmother (Barbara Barrie, though I saw understudy Alice Cannon), who believes him to be a lovely boy who will
eventually find his mate, and offers what life advice he can; but Jordan finds
the comfort in that belief less and less encouraging. And in fact, he is a
lovely boy, no dark secrets keeping love at bay, save the luck of the draw and
perhaps his own innate feelings of social clumsiness, so he spends the play mostly
as a cipher (although one with a clear desire, upon which hangs enough
specificity for an actor to feed on and create a central personality), and the
play itself episodically marks time until the inevitable moment when Jordan,
unable to sustain the social nicety of pretending that as each friend gets
married, their relationships will basically stay the same, finally goes off
about it, in a manner both horrible and forgivably human.
I
think this is the kind of play that certain gifted young playwrights (and
Harmon is unequivocally gifted) need to write; exploring the world they know
and the people they know from the perspective they know. But there’s a
callowness at the core—that’s not bad, it just is what it
is—because the perspective is limited to that, and to me—and this observation may be only about me—it feels like a play revealing truths that are only deep if you’re still of that generation and trying
to dope things out. (Ironically, a key moment of the play has the friend he
goes off on, pointing out that there are moments in life that, despite his
disappointments, are not about him. Same malady, different context.) I’m more
interested in the young playwright who can transcend his generation and tell me a few things I don’t
know and haven’t seen. (I still boggle that Herb Gardner wrote A
Thousand Clowns when his was 24.)
Anyway:
well directed (Trip Cullman) and
well-acted. And don’t let me dissuade you from the ride. Just don’t kid
yourself about what’s under the hood.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page