Kicking off the season at the Circle Rep is “Reckless,” a new play by Craig Lucas that tries to package its own inadequacies as a statement about contemporary life. Mr. Lucas is the author of “Blue Window,” which won awards, and “Three Postcards,” a musical on which he collaborated with the composer-lyricist Craig Carnelia. I never saw “Blue Window,” to my regret, but I remember “Three Postcards” as a sweetly hip and unpretentious interlude. “Reckless” begins promisingly, with a husband and wife bedded down for the night in their suburban home on Christmas Eve. The wife, Rachel (Robin Bartlett), is waxing eloquent about Christmas, family, and well-being, while the husband, Tom (Michael Piontek), sits silent, watching a flickering television screen. Just as we feel we can stand no more of the wife’s effusions, the husband tells her that he has taken a contract out on her life. A hit man is due to arrive at any moment, Tom explains, and he bundles her out into the snow. Why Tom has changed his mind and decided to spare Rachel is not clear, but we’re jovially willing to accept a plot device that we hope will set Rachel on a journey of discovery as refreshing as the opening scene.
At the local filling station, Rachel hooks up with Lloyd (John Dossett), a mysterious physiotherapist, who takes her home to his deaf-mute, paraplegic wife, Pooty (Welker White), and the three set up house together. Lloyd turns out to be living bigamously under an assumed name, having deserted a previous family consisting of a wife with multiple sclerosis and two children, one of whom, owing to Lloyd’s unfortunate handling of a snow-blower while inebriated, is permanently brain-damaged. Pooty turns out to be only feigning deafness in order to secure her husband’s love and attention; in their relationship with Rachel there is enough of zany interest to engage the mind for perhaps the next ten or fifteen minutes. But, in a scene guaranteed to insult the intelligence of any self-respecting audience, Rachel consults a psychiatrist—the first in a long line, all played by Joyce Reehling—and we get not only a recap of the plot but a spoon-feeding exegetical statement on how dreamlike it has all been. From this point on, “Reckless” becomes increasingly studied in its perversity and incoherence, and it ends by falling apart completely. Rachel takes a job at a humanitarian organization staffed by two sinister types (Kelly Connell and Susan Blommaert). There is an extended game show sequence, a double murder involving some poisoned champagne, a suicide (also involving champagne), a talk-show sequence, and yet another murder. The penultimate scene finds Rachel catatonic in a halfway-house shelter for the homeless.
By this time, Mr. Lucas’s play has become mired in its own pretensions. Still, it’s easy to see why the Circle Rep would take on a script like “Reckless,” which at first glance looks like one of those dark comedies that use slightly absurdist actions and occurrences as metaphors for general moral and emotional predicaments. (David Steven Rappaport’s “Cave Life,” produced at the Circle Rep last season, and featuring the wonderful Miss Bartlett in a similar but significantly meatier role, was a more successful instance of this genre.) “Reckless” is ultimately mute;it’s possible to feel, moreover, that when Mr. Lucas begins raising issues like mental illness and homelessness he is touching on subjects he has not earned the right to broach. You could graft any number of interpretations onto his play—that we’re all escaping from something, that we all forge identities for ourselves, that the wrongs and traumas that we visit on our children are not our responsibility, only the result of something that in turn was visited on us—but if you did you’d be putting more work into the enterprise than the playwright was willing to; all he has done is to cock a few bottles of champagne at us.
Norman Nene’s production is as good as it could be, considering the material. He has directed a first-rate cast deftly and used a lot of gimmickry in an attempt to distract our attention from the essential vacuity of the work: the ironies in the play reside in Walker Hicklin’s costumes, the sliding panels of Loy Arcena’s set, and the feelings inspired by Chuck London and Stewart Werner’s copious sound engineering. The sprightly cast also does its best to make the play watchable, but to no avail. Not even the final scene—in which Miss Bartlett (now an analyst in her own right) and Mr. Piontek (now playing Tom, Jr., the grown-up son whom she is preparing to treat) manage, astonishingly, to wring pathos out of nothing—is worth waiting for.
I wish someone would declare a ban on plays with extended game-show sequences. I’d like to think audiences are above them. Award-winning playwrights certainly should be.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, October 10, 1988