Why all the long faces over “Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen,” at the Mitzi E. Newhouse? Call me superficial, but I thought it was a delight, and just the right thing for Gregory Mosher, who got his start at the Goodman Theater, in Chicago, to end his tenure as the director of Lincoln Center with: a piece by a Chicago writer (Elaine May), directed by Mosher himself, starring Mike Nussbaum and William H. Macy (two actors whom Mosher helped to make familiar around New York), and featuring an actress (Zohra Lampert) who spends most of the evening trying to gain access to the stage. “Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen” doesn’t justify the ways of God to man, or anything. It doesn’t solve the riddle of existence or suggest how we can put an end to world hunger. But it makes you laugh, ends sweetly, and gives you something to talk about at dinner. What do you want for twenty-five bucks?
Actually, “Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen” is exactly the sort of play I wish Mr. Mosher had been putting on at the Newhouse and the Vivian Beaumont all along. I could never muster much enthusiasm for their long-running hits (what were long-running hits doing at Lincoln Center, anyway?) and their big-splash productions—“Anything Goes,” “Sarafina,” the all-star “Waiting for Godot.” I always thought that what Mosher should be serving up was something that had special meaning for him or for Lincoln Center’s audience—either Chicago theater or plays (like “Some Americans Abroad” and “Six Degrees of Separation”) that in some way held a comic mirror up to the particular class of people likely to subscribe to the Newhouse and the Beaumont. The Elaine May piece belongs to the latter category: it’s a play about the then-and-now of the world of ideas, explored through a relationship that develops between an aging writer-intellectual (Mr. Nussbaum) and a vacuum-cleaner salesman (Mr. Macy) who, having insinuated himself into the writer’s apartment, finds himself unable to leave.
In general, plays in which people kidnap other people or hold each other hostage make me nervous. They’re usually sadistic, in a craven sort of way, and they grope too effortfully after some notion of social importance. “Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen” reminded me of nothing so much as a “Road” movie—with Mr. Macy and Mr. Nussbaum as Bob and Bing, and Ms. Lampert as a sort of mitteleuropäische Dorothy Lamour. Only, the jokes, instead of being about sex and show business, are about philosophical questions: rules, definitions, choosing sides, perceptions of truth. It would be unfair to Miss May to go more deeply into what happens in the play or to identify the specific values that Mr. Macy and Mr. Nussbaum come to represent. “Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen” is a divertissement: ideas flit by and disappear before you’ve managed to figure out what was clever about them. But you get your bearings when you realize that Mr. Nussbaum is responding to Mr. Macy’s questions about the state of his rugs as though he were testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
“Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen” is a writer’s play, but it’s also an actors’ play, and it gives Macy and Nussbaum, who have been working together on and off for fifteen years (they both appeared in the first production that Mosher directed at Lincoln Center—a pair of Mamet one-acts), a chance to put on a real show. Each is playing the character he plays best—the Jew who’s seen it all, the clean-cut naïf—but with a kind of sinister spin, which makes it all the more fun to watch. They’re both doing moral slapstick, essentially: Nussbaum balances mile-high towers of indignation on nothing at all, while Macy sustains the kind of slow burns Cary Grant used to spin out in movies like “Bringing Up Baby” and “Arsenic and Old Lace.” Macy gets to go in for a lot of physical slapstick, too. (One sight gag, involving a Murphy bed, gave me much joy.) The pleasure you get from watching him is the pleasure of seeing an actor who is actually a very cool guy—leading-man material—disguising himself as a nerd. Once or twice, I found myself wishing that Mosher had cast these two instead of Steve Martin and Robin Williams in “Waiting for Godot.”
Miss Lampert, though less visible, is equally funny, playing a woman who keeps dropping by and trying to get into Mr. Nussbaum’s apartment. She’s a veritable symphony of Jewish mannerisms. But the third star of the play is really the apartment itself, a witty extravaganza designed by John Lee Beatty. It’s worth getting to the theater early just to take in the set, which, like much of the play, is partly a joke on exposition. You know you’re looking at a man’s apartment not from the mess—the half-eaten pizza and the remains of a pie, the cartons of Chinese food, and the piles of laundry scattered around might belong to anyone—but from a man’s jacket hanging discreetly where only a man would hang a jacket, just as you know the apartment is in New York less from the bars on the window than from the peculiarly inconvenient placement of the kitchen. But the scenery also seems like a joke on the whole idea of clever set design—specifically, on the problem of designing for Lincoln Center’s stages. Mr. Beatty has, to all appearances, remodeled the theatre, building over an entire section of seats, obliterating one of the two usual stage exits, and completely blocking the other. It’s as though in approaching this last production he and Mr. Mosher had decided to throw up their hands and say, “The hell with it!”
Everything on the set is somehow perfectly chosen to belong both to the past and to the present—from the haircut that Macy sports (which is not quite fifties but a take on the fifties) to the foodstuffs that are periodically brought onstage. Only a few objects seem wrong because they plant questions about when the play is taking place. Two of them are books (a political text that sits on the hi-fi at the end of Act I, and a Penguin Classic that Mr. Nussbaum is reading in bed at the end of Act II). The third is hardly worth mentioning. Could I respectfully suggest, however, that for the rest of the run, which I hope will be long and prosperous, Mr. Macy be more than usually cautious about what color underclothing he wears? Some of the newer and more vibrant shades of turquoise are visible even through frosted glass.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, June 24, 1991