Hurlyburly

I don't know if the original production of Hurlyburly was a comedy. The film - over an hour shorter than the play - has bitterly funny scenes but plays as tragedy. As such, it's very effective. All the more curious, then, that this production is an extremely funny black comedy. The irony is that the three main leads - Ethan Hawke as Eddie, Josh Hamilton as Mickey and Bobby Cannavale as Phil - all seem to be doing impressions of their counterparts from the movie (Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey and Chaz Palminteri). Hawke uses precisely the panicked nasal whine Penn chose, Hamilton does Spacey as well as Spacey does Chris Walken, and Cannavale, from his first moments onstage, appears to be making exactly the same vocal and acting choices as Palminteri did. Catherine Kellner, on the other hand, is brilliantly original as Bonnie, one of the women the men abuse. Parker Posey as Darlene pushes the comedy along effectively. Wallace Shawn, in blond toupee as Artie, looks like Wallace Shawn in a blonde toupee. He's not bad, but he's not particularly effective either.

The remaining actor, Halley Wegryn Gross, as the teen sex toy, Donna, whom Artie brings the other men as a "gift," has the most difficult job of all, to be at once Rabe's conception of a perfectly clear-thinking Wise Child while remaining a degenerate's fantasy: a cheerfully selfless slut who objects only to being hit in the face. She gives a credible performance, but following in giants' footsteps, she more or less equally (a) succeeds and (b) reveals the shortcomings of the play itself.

Donna was played originally by Cynthia Nixon, when she was a wispy, blonde 18-year-old. Although I missed that performance, I saw her in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, in which she played a very similar Wise-Child role simultaneously (running back and forth between theaters). And in the film, Donna is played by Anna Paquin. Both those actresses have the ability to transcend sketchy material to imbue it with their own grace. Ms. Gross, with no discredit to her talents, plays the material straight. And that reveals the empty core of Hurlyburly. The men of the play are all vile scum, yet the structure of the piece compels us to sympathize with their desires. Onscreen, Paquin's angel ultimately delivers clarifying wisdom to Penn's Eddie, whose ranting monologues are all pathetic attempts at "clarity." Paquin and Penn achieve grace, a redeeming moment amidst horrifying misogyny, drug abuse and stupidity. I wouldn't be surprised if Ms. Nixon and William Hurt pulled that off in the original, too.

Gross and Hawke, on the other hand, don't pull off that climactic moment, despite very heavy-handed lighting that all but announces in supertitles, "Eddie gets it!!"

Not pulling that off, though, may be a more honest rendering of the final scene, given that the previous moment of conscience Eddie - and Mickey - experience (about having shared in traumatizing Bonnie's daughter as Bonnie performed oral sex on their mutual friend in front of the kid), passes quickly as they return to habitual denial.

Because for all its laughs, Hurlyburly laughs with its misogynistic characters more than it laughs at them, celebrating male abuse of power over women while compelling fine actresses to bare their breasts (Ms. Kellner), have their breasts groped downstage center (the NYU frosh Ms. Gross by Mr. Hamilton) and perform a crotch-stroking lap dance (Ms. Kellner on Mr. Cannavale). Curiously enough, in the original, it was Sigourney Weaver, as Darlene, who took off her shirt onstage (a moment of directorial daring reported at the time), suggesting that the play demands exposed flesh more than it needs to expose a truth about any given character. (Ms. Posey's Darlene stays clothed.)

So while Hurlyburly is a brilliantly written entertainment, a mostly honest work about disgusting people, it is not, in this production, also a play about a central character's redemption. It is, instead, a story about a Hollywood degenerate and his equally dissipated friends, who live without being capable of reflection, much though some of them try. Even more trivially, the play offers the men few consequences for their actions other than psychological, suggesting that the most important aspect of their abusive and self-destructive behaviors is how they affect their own self-esteem. It's funny and fascinating, but it's not deep, because it affirms its characters' behaviors at least as much as it challenges them.

Derek McLane's bachelor-pad set manages utter verisimilitude without at all suggesting its California location. Jeff Mahshie's pitch-perfect costumes push suggestions Mickey is actually gay, a theme underexplored by the direction. All in all, a vividly exciting few hours of theater, filled with scornful laughter, but within a production that offers less than the sum of its parts.