NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME
Written by ERic J. Rodriguez and Charles Sothers
Directed by Conor Bagley
Newman Mills Theatre at MCC Theatre Space
(Not an MCC production)
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Self-production no longer has the automatic taint of “vanity production,” because the economics of the theatre has changed so much in the last 40 years or so; but the difference between self-reliance and self-indulgence is always self-evident. Usually so evident that there’s no point in calling out the latter. But since Not Ready for Prime Time is, as you might surmise, about the conception-creation-casting-nascency of the original Saturday Night Live, replete with all the first generation-and-a-half players and then-young producer, you might be tempted to attend, if only out of curiosity. Since my main desire here is to save you the money and the effort, I’ll make quick work of the enterprise without too much in the way of snark. No point in torturing the delivery system personnel either.
The playwriting, as the above suggests, is sub-par. It starts out as a memory narration by producer Lorne Michaels, whereupon he steps in and out of inevitable flashback. It becomes shortly thereafter apparent that what’s being dramatized will be the available, documented public history, a kind of re-chewed cabbage that will go through its paces consecutively and schematically, ticking off the backstage shenanigans, collisions, melodramas and intrigues, mixed with some of the on-air comedy material. The play bangs on and on in this manner, there’s an intermission, then it bangs on again, in an unusually attenuated second act (Long Day’s Journey Into Saturday Night?), with the conceit of Michaels as narrator falling away, as, for no justified stylistic “permission,” some of the others take turns narrating. “Enhancing” this inconsistency: Where the Act One staging is mildly proficient, it becomes notably ragged and even disjointed in Act Two. This haphazardness demonstrates one of the classic vanity production tells: a second act in which threads, themes and even technique just generally fall apart. Whichb inevitably leads to being—or at least seeming—under-rehearsed. When elements don’t cohere, they defy intuitive creative leaps and become difficult to wrangle.
Subsequently, it’s hard to properly assess the actors trapped in this production or how well they might have captured the personae of the people they’re portraying, because they’ve been so insufficiently directed. The most egregious tell on this front is how consciously aware you always are of actors at work, reciting memorized lines, trying to recreate the icons of an era, when the signature characteristic of those icons was their on-air edginess, unpredictability, volatility even when performing their own rehearsed material. Not that having to create the illusion of spontaneity—while representing other performers—doesn’t present a challenging paradox; worthier efforts than this one have failed. But the key is recognizing that as a goal—and eventual relaxation. Not a lessening of dramatic tension, but a lessening of visible effort; the celebrity persona has to blend with the actor. I can cite any number of such portrayals where in a side-by-side comparison with the real article, you’re struck by how little the differences matter; and sometimes by how deliberately the actor has exaggerated one characteristic over another and emphasized a strength oif his or her own in the service of communicating essence over imitation. But even pastiche requires comfort; if you can’t easy-lob an off-the-cuff pun, your Groucho is going to suck.
Which is why Not Ready for Prime Time is rarely genuinely funny. Some scattered laughter, yes; given the subject matter and borrowed material, the play isn’t completely dour. But if you can’t make funny the overriding characteristic of a play about being funny (see Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor and Jim Geoghan’s Only Kidding), not only aren’t you ready for prime time…you’re not ready for your vanity project either. Then again, no one ever is…