CurtainUp
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A CurtainUp Review
The Babylon Line

I've begun to mutter in the supermarket. Like a crazy woman — like a crazy woman! Mutter mutter mutter — these monologues! Screeds, Scenes and epigrams while staring at a cutlet in a freezer case — but I never write them down. I'm suffering from ...Acute Repressed Graphomania!— Joan

Then why don't you write them down?— Aaron
babylon
Josh Radnor and Elizabeth Reaser (Jeremy Daniel)
The above quoted interchange is between adult education writing class teacher Aaron Port (Josh Radnor) and Joan Dellamond (Elizabeth reaser), the most troubled and talented student in his once-a-week adult education writing class. Port, who commutes on the titular Long Island Railroad line to the class at the Levittown development's high school from Manhattan, is too soured about his own less than satisfactory career and marriage to be a particularly pro-active and inspiring teacher. Forget about the inspiring Professor Keating of The Dead Poet's Society presented as a stage play at Classic Stage ( review ). Port's classes consist mainly of the students reading something they wrote and discussing it among themselves, with little commentary or words of wisdom from him.

Joan hangs around after the class to avoid contact with the other women and Port because his train doesn't leave right after the class) wgucg does lead to her writing things down. That includes an assignment that details how and why she didn't leave her house for seven years and became "thin as a sentence" shadowy as a prayer" and sends shockwaves through the class by concluding with her challenging Aaron to act on their mutual attraction.

While Port's interactions with Joan are a key element of The Babylon Line, the best thing about this new Richard Greenberg play is that he's created sublime acting opportunities for the entire 7-member cast. One of the students, Anna Cantor (Maddie Corman), is actually a carry-over from the main character in Greenberg's last play Our Mother's Brief Affair , which despite despite the as usual prime- Linda Lavin as Anna failed to move into my list of prime-Greenberg plays ( Take Me Out, Three Days of Rain,Assembled Parties and the under-appreciated The Dazzle and The Violet Hour ) from sub-prime entries like entries like Everett Bekin. The Babylon Line falls somewhere between those two groups, though closer to the hits than the misses. And while Maddie Corman plays the cross-linked Anna, the most Lavinesque character here is Randy Graff's brilliantly obnoxious Frieda Cohen. (I found myself fantasizing about Graff and Lavin together in a Greenberg play)

The tight little circle of Jewish matrons enrolled in Port's class because their first choices (cooking, flower arranging, politics)is comprised of Graff's Frieda, Corman's Anna and Julie Halston as Midge Braverman. They are classic Greenberg women, ripe for revealing the layers beneath their stereotypical personas. On the other hand Reaser's terrifically nuanced Joan could be a cousin to one of Tennessee Williams' or William Inge's emotionally fragile females.

Radnor nicely captures Port's ennui, discontent and sexual ambivalence. The other two male characters add odd-ball color and variety to the class. The always reliable Frank Wood doesn't disappoint as Jack Hassenpflug, a World War II veteran for whom the class is a chance to air out his nightmarish combat memories. Michael Oberholtzer also impresses as Marc Adams, an oddball young man who claims to be writing a magnum opus.

Having his serio-comic memory play unfold in an adult education writing class setting and its location in the sprawling Long Island subdivision of Levittown, Long Island during the year 1967 also serve Greenberg's larger ambition for this serio-comic memory play. The set-up allows Greenberg to explore the challenges of writing professionally and even as an ungraded classroom exercise. His chosen time and place for those weekly sessions are a springboard for his commentary on the suburban mores that are on the cusp of major changes.

It's all over ambitious and too diffuse (for example, an unnecessary detour to a New York meeting between Radnor's wannabe writer turned reluctant teacher and Oberholtzer double tasking as a successfully published friend). Yet, Greenberg is still very much at the top of his game as a gifted wordsmith which means bursts of lyricism as well as characterizing conversations filled with hilarious and stinging comments. The single unintentionally super-relevant one that gets the most laughs is prompted by Anna's comment about Frieda's disdainful recollections of Levittown's billionaire developer's authoritarian inspection visits: "He could be very authoritarian, that's true. The man was a developer. That's not a person you respect."

Terry Kinney steers the actors through their classroom encounters with fluid little pauses between sessions. The reading aloud segments are enlivened by members of the cast leaving their seats to act out the content.

Richard Hoover's high-ceilinged classroom and framed presidential photos, Darrel Mahoney's projections of Levittown's the bland uniformity, David Hoover's lighting help to clarify the look and feel of time and place. Sarah J. Holden's costumes are also on the mark, though the women arriving without any protective gear during a snowstorm struck me as an oversight more than some subtle visual metaphor.

The bookending 2015 opening and closing scenes establish Radnor as the narrator. The 85-year-old Radnor quickly and effectively flashes back to his unwanted part-time gig. However, the concluding update of how everyone, Port included, fared over the years feels tacked on, an effort to neatly tie all the plot elements together. But with Greenberg doing the neatening up, you can't help being glad that you took that train ride to suburbia with him.





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PRODUCTION NOTES
The Babylon Line by Richard Greenberg
Cast: Maddie Corman (Anna Cantor), Randy Graff (Frieda Cohen), Julie Halston (Midge Braverman), Michael Oberholtzer (Marc Adams), Josh Radnor (Aaron Port), Elizabeth Reaser (Joan Dellamond), Frank Wood (Jack Hasenplflug).
Sets by Richard Hoover
Costumes by Sarah J. Holden
Lighting by David Weiner
Sound by Rob Milburn and Michael Bodeen
Projections: Darrel Maloney
Stage Manager: Denise Yaney
Running Time: 2 hours and 20 minutes, including intermission
Mitzi E. Newhouse Theate at Lincoln Center
From 11/10/16; opening 12/05/16/closing 1/22/17.
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at 12/07 performance


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