I got to Buyer and Cellar late and only after its transfer
to the Barrow Street Theatre (after a limited run at Rattlestick) and I’m
pleased to report, it lives up to its hype. The one-actor play, by Jonathan
Tollins, after a very funny prologue in
which said actor (Michael Urie)
makes sure we all understand that he is an actor and that the
play is strictly a fiction—a
device that would under normal circumstances distance you from the play-to-follow, but because it’s so
hip-and-insider, sets up the sensibility and paradoxically draws you
in—is about an unemployed gay
actor in L.A. named Alex. And the job he
takes to make ends meet.
The
published fact upon which the play is
founded is that Barbra Streisand has designed the cellar of her opulent house
to resemble an elite shopping mall. The fiction is that Alex is hired as its latest curator and
caretaker. And sole member of the sales staff, there to deal with its sole
customer: Babs.
With
this as a jumping off point, Buyer and Cellar hits all the obvious themes—star worship, the difference between
admiration and reverence, the alternate universe of celebrity, the
necessariness and danger of self-deception for an actor, the perils of social
isolation—and etcetera—but does so with such wit and panache that
“obvious” is a inducement to keep following, to see how those themes will be
filtered through Alex’s (and by extension Mr. Tollins’) fresh perspective. Mr.
Urie’s performance ranks easily with the great one-man evenings—Hal
Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight, James
Whitmore in Paul Shyre’s Will Rogers’ U.S.A. and William Windom in A James Thurber
Evening—and Stephen Brackett’s
direction is both nuanced and invisible, as should always be the case with a
one-actor play.
I
wish the intermissionless comedy were about fifteen minutes shorter—there’s
some thematic repetition and overwriting that can be thinned out, and you’d
think people so sharply attuned to comedy would sense that—but then it
would be perfect. And then what would Tollins, Urie and Brackett have left to
aspire to when they take it on the road…?
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