I NEED THAT
By Theresa Rebeck
Directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel
Starring Danny DeVito
A Production of the Roundabout
American Airlines Theatre
Reviewed by David Spencer
Theresa Rebeck is not only one of the most prolific American dramatists ever, and among the best; she’s also one of the most versatile. A veteran TV seies dramatis too, she seems bound by no genre or cultural or socio-political emphasis; if there’s anything that gives her work a Rebeckian imprimatur, it’s her knack for creating a setting that draws together idiosyncratic characters who are, under the surface, uniquely damaged, and playing out the possibility that they may help each other find a path to some kind of healing. Sometimes they do; and the balance between comedy and drama depends on whether she’s emphasizing one over the other, though neither is ever far apart from the other either.
I Need That is definitely a comedy. Its central character is Sam (Danny DeVito), senior citizen, retiree, extreme hoarder. The clutter is not merely out of control; he’s on the town authority hit-list for eviction if he doesn’t finally clean up. His daughter Amelia (real life daughter Lucy DeVito) continues to be distraught that she can’t get through to him; and he has only one friend an African-American fellow retiree named Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas), who tries his best to take the clutter in stride, and sometimes does.
That thumbnail description, though, also sums up the basic problem of the play, and one that, in a certain sense, is impossible to overcome, even for the gifted Ms. Rebeck, because it’s baked in. The premise itself is schematic. There’s really only one way for the play to go and remain a comedy: Sam has to find his way to order. Everything else is just steps along the path to triggering that. And beyond setting up the basic interrelationship dynamics, the path isn’t that long, nor the trigger that profound. Lest this seem a spoiler, note that the alternative would be Sam not conquering his clutter. And then he’d be doomed. And then you’d be in the land of Simon Grey’s Butley, a play with many laughs, but ultimately a tragedy about a man too self-destructive and bitter to get out of his own way or want to.
Does anyone want to see that, especially in a play starring feisty, diminutive Mr. DeVito, not to mention one with that audience-identification title, one most of us have employed when hanging onto things we needn’t hang onto?
No indeed; so only two things can keep the play aloft: the innate charm of the actors, and the quality of the banter (which includes the level of narrative tension maintained by backstory anecdotes, which include character complexities we might not have expected—along with a solo-play board-game set-piece monologue for Mr. DeVito, which is funny, but also outright padding that could be excised and do no harm).
To say that the play is actually kept aloft by that—all of which it has (especially the charm, of the actors)—is perhaps to overstate the case…but at least it keeps the play going, under the brisk-as-possible direction of Moritz von Stuelpnagel; and that can be enough, for some.
When they work, those elements are the clutter that distracts you.