October 15, 2018
I don’t want to say all that much about Richard Bean’s The Nap, because going even a few inches into description risks spoilers; and that’s because it’s a little bit in the “long con” genre, perhaps defined for all time by David S. Ward’s screenplay for The Sting (and to some degree, Anthony Shaffer’s thriller Sleuth; and, when you really think about it, classic Mission: Impossible episodes). The tone of The Nap cants more overtly toward comedy first, and how and who plays the game come from a less familiar angle.
Its milieu is the world of professional snooker, and its locales go from a playing room in a British Legion to an internationally televised World Championship match. And our hero is young Dylan Spokes (Ben Schnetzer), on the verge of owning the title, with the encouragement of his not-very-smart working class dad, Bobby (John Ellison Conlee) and his slick-unto-absurdity manager Tony (Max Gordon Moore). But trouble looms in the person of malaprop-prone trans-gender gangster Waxy Bush (Alexandra Billings), whose pawn is Dylan’s floozy Mom and Bobby’s ex-wife Stella (Johanna Day). For reasons you don’t need or want to know, I won’t describe the other characters who machine the plot along, but I’ll tell you that, like those already particularized, they’re also played with great flair, by Heather Lind, Thomas Jay Ryan and Bhavesh Patel. As notable is the direction by Daniel Sullivan, an almost-always reliable helmsman, but not the first person you’d associate with a show that has this many moving parts, technically and story-wise; and on top of that, the patois of Northern England. Which is delivered so convincingly that, at the talkback following the performance I attended (I don’t usually stay for those, but something held me), there were audience members who had thought they were watching the original British cast, not realizing that the lot of them were just well-coached (by Ben Furey) Yanks with superb ears.
I should caution, though, that if, like me, you’re a practiced connoisseur of the genre, you will probably spot certain “tells” earlier than some of the “civilians” seated around you, and be onto at least the general game before the full truth is revealed; but there still might be enough to fool you a little, and there’s certainly always enough to entertain you.
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