Richard Nelson’s “Some Americans Abroad,” which the Lincoln Center Theater is producing at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, is a quiet, low-key comedy of manners about a group of literature professors on their department’s annual theater tour of England. It has very little plot and no overt message; its subject is American Anglophilia and self-hatred. Knowing that “Some Americans Abroad” had wildly pleased British audiences, I approached Nelson’s play with trepidation, fearing that it might take the Ugly American as its easy target. But Nelson’s characters themselves hate Ugly Americans: indeed, they seem to hate all Americans—including, to a large degree, each other. They claim English literature as their special province without really seeming to understand it. They love Wordsworth and Henry James (of course), but they haven’t much sympathy with Milton. Guardians of taste and high learning, they worry about whether or not this or that idea is “publishable”—the way lawyers talk about something being “billable”—and say things to each other like “I understand you like fiction” or “I don’t have much time for fiction myself,” as though all books, like all Americans, were the same. Listening to these people hold forth—they interrupt and talk across each other on such subjects as disarmament, capital punishment, the merits of Shaw, and the quality of their theater seats—and noting their habits of gesture and mannerism, thinking and behavior, and, especially, growing familiar with their literary-guidebook view of England, one sees the utter pointlessness of their journey.
Remorselessly well observed—and funny, in spite of the gentle level of the satire—Nelson’s play is a little difficult to place generically. Though lacking a plot structure per se, it has elements of some of the very sort of plays that the characters in “Some Americans Abroad” must be lapping up, and that the English themselves are raised on: sophisticated academic comedies that entertain an audience with witticisms about university politics, leading up to soft revelations about who is sleeping with whom. (One thinks primarily of Simon Gray.) The first act centers around the fate of an untenured professor, Henry (Bob Balaban), who, everyone else seems to know, has been replaced for the coming year; the second act focuses on a charge of sexual harassment that is leveled at one of the professors, Philip (John Bedford Lloyd), by a truant student (Elisabeth Shue) who wants to cover her tracks. Early on, Nelson establishes the fact of Philip’s routine promiscuity with such heavy-handed subtlety that we think one of those West End revelations of infidelity is what’s in store for us. But the question of Philip’s bedfellow turns out to be a non-issue, as, in a sense, does the question of Henry’s career. Instead, Nelson’s play, a series of snapshots, shows us isolated scenes from a trip abroad; it keeps the essence of life—like the real inhabitants of the world of England—decidedly offstage.
Throughout the play, Nelson cheats our expectation about what will prove to be dramatically important, focusing his camera on character rather than event—particularly on the character of Taylor, the Machiavellian department chairman, played by Colin Stinton. Mr. Stinton is riveting without being showy, and Taylor’s character is the element that comes closest to tying together the strands of Nelson’s plot. Some alchemy in the subtle brands of officiousness and self-importance that Stinton combines—the level of cowardice with which he urges an American tourist speaking at normal volume not to shout, the precise angle at which he averts his gaze when lying—fills in the spaces between the scenes. We come away feeling we’ve seen a complete picture.
The acting in Roger Michell’s production is all of topnotch quality. I don’t think I’ve ever seen either Kate Burton (as Henry’s wife) or Frances Conroy (as an earnest female academic) appear to better advantage; and Mr. Balaban brings the same sinister combination of obsequiousness and repressed rage to the role of Henry that he brought to the role of the less powerful of the two movie-makers in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow.” John Rothman does a wonderful little cameo as a Stratford tourist, but it is perhaps Henderson Forsythe and Jane Hoffman, as an academic couple living abroad, who steal the show.
Michell’s design team takes the same knowing and piecemeal approach to depicting life that the play does. Rick Fisher (lighting) introduces each scene with a flashbulb effect, and Alexandra Byrne (sets and costumes) has bits of furniture and decoration coming down out of the flies to evoke this or that locale. If you’ve been to those places, you know how exactly right the details are, and there’s something chastening about the pleasure you notice yourself taking in the moment of recognition.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, February 26, 1990