The Realistic Joneses
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Cititour.com Review
Will Eno has been famously compared to absurdist master Samuel Beckett, but his voice is so refreshing and unique that it’s hard to pin it down by analogy. With The Realistic Joneses, his first play to reach Broadway, more theatergoers will have a chance to sample the weirdness that defines his world and clever wordplay, existentially fraught characters and light touch with dark subjects that make his work seem so everyday and beguiling at the same time.
A starry quartet of actors play 40-something neighboring couples, both named Jones. They meet when John and Pony (Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei), who have just moved in down the road, stumble into the backyard of Bob and Jennifer (Tracy Letts and Toni Collette). For the next 90 minutes, the characters visit or encounter each other, usually in two-character scenes, and awkwardness prevails. Both men, it turns out, are suffering from Harriman Leavey Syndrome, a mysterious illness that resembles middle age (“sounds like a jazz combo,” John remarks), and neither they nor their wives know how to deal with it. Bob feels a strong attraction to Pony; Jennifer lends John a sympathetic ear.
Beware of the title. Though their struggles are universal, this is realism tinged with the absurd. The couples’ lives, like most people’s, are rather ordinary, yet through Eno’s playful use of language, they’re elevated to archetypal heights. (Archetypal heights of ordinariness is still something, right?) Pony sums up romance in the Eno canon when she tells John: “To think that you and me aren’t the greatest love story in the world. To think that we’re just kind of a mess, and we’re nice to each other, and we have fun sometimes.”
Director Sam Gold and his excellent cast mold the humor and angst into harmony, without letting either one dominate. Hall is especially touching and funny in depicting John’s fear of being swallowed up by the world, and Tomei, Collette and Letts bring eloquence to their characters’ self-consciousness. On a particularly good morning, Bob chirps, “I feel great. I feel like I’m 43 again.” That’s about the best he can hope for. Because while this may be Will Eno’s most accessible and hopeful work to date, this is as feel-good a play as he’s likely to write.
By Diane Snyder
Visit the Site
http://therealisticjoneses.com
Cast
Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Marisa Tomei
Open/Close Dates
Opening 4/6/2014
Closing 7/6/2014
Preview Open/ Preview Close Dates
Preview Opening 3/13/2014
Closing Open-ended
Box Office
212-239-6200
Theatre Info
Lyceum Theatre
149 West 45th Street
New York, NY 10036
Map
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